Rebound is a depression programme within MOST (Moderated Online Social Therapy), a social media-enabled mental health https://www.ihs.gov/california/index.cfm/offices/oph/bh/resources/helpful-organizations/ platform developed in Australia. It is facilitated by a practitioner and has been evaluated in mental healthcare agencies in The Netherlands (van der Zanden 2012). Both serious games and gamification have been highlighted as ways to potentially increase the impact of mental health interventions (Fleming 2017).
apps revolutionizing mental health accessibility
Stress and anxiety treatment apps like Headspace and Calm provide guided meditations and mindfulness exercises . These tools leverage modern technology to improve mental health management and monitoring . Traditionally, mental health treatment has included medication, in‐person therapy, and institutionalization. Smartphone applications, web‐based therapy systems, wearable tech, artificial intelligence‐powered resources, and virtual reality (VR) technologies were evaluated for efficacy and side effects. Digital therapeutics are software-based treatments designed to manage or treat medical conditions, including mental health disorders.
Mudiyanselage et al. evaluated digital mental health applications’ clinical practicality, effectiveness, and limitations. This synthesis aimed to summarize digital mental health tools’ current status, benefits, and future prospects. After 2010, consumer acceptance of mobile mental health solutions increased along with cloud‐based healthcare solutions and mobile app marketplaces .
Impactful actions for using ethics and data security checklists are required with digital capabilities increasing at a rapid rate; for example, IoT-based approaches. Despite the health-protective attributes of a physician’s career, the rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation are high among them (24.8% of a cohort of Australian physicians prior to a 12-month period—approximately 2-fold that of the general population) . The connections between stakeholders (patients or end users and physicians or mental health care practitioners) exist within a complex environment. For example, a quasi-experimental design for a model of delivering technology-enabled mental health services revealed relatively strong evidence on model effectiveness before evaluation through randomized controlled trials .
If the target is access, then the litmus test will be the shift from efficacy to effectiveness, which will require adoption of digital interventions at scale and sustained engagement. These approaches were largely developed to address the barriers to access and delays in treatment. The concept behind all of these applications is that monitoring behavior ecologically by using a device that has already been adopted by patients will improve diagnosis and treatment, specifically targeting the lack of measurement and the delay in care noted previously. In addition, many of these clinically oriented tools are necessarily brief and therefore capture only a narrow spectrum of a patient’s overall state (e.g., general depression symptoms) and are administered infrequently, leading to a collection of one-time, or “snapshot,” impressions of a patient’s mental health. Can digital tools solve the problems of measurement, access, delay, fragmentation, and negative attitudes? Finally, and connected to the other four problems, are the attitudinal barriers, often referred to as stigma and consisting of a range of negative attitudes—especially negative views of psychiatrists, diagnostic labels, and treatments—that limit some people from seeking or adhering to care.
Navigating the Future
This figure is an example of the myriad of digital tools that a user could be prescribed to use based on their bespoke needs. While it may be challenging to assess the impact of any one app (or part of that app), understanding how people naturalistically engage with apps offers new opportunities to better assess their impact and develop more valid measures to represent their utility. Moreover, the users can plan their workouts and follow different programmes that can be supported using digital animations with visual instructions and digital timers for each exercise. The app also allows users to exercise from home when needed using ‘digital classes’ aided by high quality video.
- It found that across all age groups, 72 per cent would use technology to avoid a hospital admission, with a similar proportion happy to use technology to monitor their health and share information and data with their doctors.
- Clinical validity was the most reported subtheme, with evidence identified from 6 (75%) studies; 2 (25%) studies reported on the user feedback subtheme and 2 (25%) on the impressions of use subtheme, which captured users’ perceptions of app content as accurate and relevant.
- Digital mental health solutions are popular but only work if people use them regularly.
HealthCall’s self-monitoring component allows users to monitor their drinking by answering questions about their behaviors; they “receive reinforcement for doing so (e.g., ‘We’re glad you called’)” (Hasin et al., 2014, p. 2). Additionally, some evidence suggests that clients may participate in counseling sessions more if they are offered in a distance telehealth environment as an alternative or an adjunct to in-person settings (Day & Schneider, 2002). As telephones, including mobile phones, have been a routine part of life for so long, research typically shows that both clinicians and clients are comfortable with telephone-based counseling. Video or Web conferencing can be conducted in a number of ways, but it typically involves a behavioral health specialist evaluating and providing consultation or counseling to a client via live, two-way, interactive audio/video connection. Clinical need and clinical benefit should drive the use of technology—not the other way around! Nevertheless, the categories establish conceptual clarity and consistency with the approach taken in the literature by Maheu, Pulier, Wilhelm, McMenamin, and Brown-Connolly (2004).