Strategic opportunities for digital mental health

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Access to mental health and wellbeing services around the world is often difficult, with limited resourcing and the lingering shadow of stigma about accessing such services affecting their uptake. The pandemic resulted in even more limited access to face-to-face services, and as people turned to other ways to access help such as helplines, these too were often also overwhelmed. However, out of this came a growing conversation about mental health which in effect, helped ameliorate the social stigma associated with mental ill health. People struggled with their wellbeing as working from home became the new norm for many, and for others, like healthcare workers, their workplace became both more stressful and dangerous. The use of digital interventions to support people’s mental health grew out of the necessity of remote access to such services, and there has been a rapid growth in the rollout of new paradigms of social prescription for digital mental health services.
The pandemic became the catalyst for the development of digital mental health interventions that can be deployed rapidly and relatively inexpensively. These can cater for the basics of managing interventions, such as series of counselling sessions efficiently, organising appointments, allowing people to self-refer, or rescheduling appointments to avoid absences. A more advanced level of engagement is client-facing technology such as video conferencing or text support, which may be working on the client’s smartphone, wherever they are. There is also a rapidly-approaching future layer where interactional data is used to personalise a service offering, facilitating more proactive and individualised care, using artificial intelligence to bring value from analysis of the interactional data so that it could help with diagnosis.
In this presentation, the research undertaken by the ChatPal project will provide contextualisation for the strategic opportunities for digital mental health.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBook of abstracts, European Conference on Mental Health
Number of pages1
Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 16 Sept 2022
Event10th European Conference on Mental Health - Session: Digital mental health: creating a multilingual mental wellbeing chatbot (ChatPal) for citizens in Northern Periphery Regions - Marriott Hotel, Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 15 Sept 202215 Sept 2022
https://ecmh.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Oral-Presentations-ECMH-2022-05092022.pdf

Other

Other10th European Conference on Mental Health - Session: Digital mental health: creating a multilingual mental wellbeing chatbot (ChatPal) for citizens in Northern Periphery Regions
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period15/09/2215/09/22
Internet address

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