If only I'd read about this last week. Would have been a perfect iPhone entry for Grand Rounds over at Shrink Rap (link in sidebar).
A $1.88 million Federal Government grant has been awarded to the Black Dog Institute and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to undertake a program to enable Australians to manage their mental health problems via mobile phone and the internet.
The idea is that people will be able to track their status on a daily basis in areas such as mood, sleep, activities, medication, physical activity as well as drug and alcohol abuse. Aimed at adolescents and adults with or at risk of developing depression, anxiety or stress, the first stage of the program will be the internet version, to be followed by the mobile phone version.
Dr Judy Proudfoot, Senior Research Fellow at the Black Dog Institute and the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales, explains that information is fed back to the users on how they are going and alerts are sent when things aren’t going well, along with links to appropriate self-help tools. In this way, the program parallels traditional face-to-face therapy, where people are asked to monitor their symptoms and activities.
A timely project. It will interesting to see how it turns out, particularly in terms of management of confidentiality because, quite coincidentally, someone recently mentioned that they do this kind of thing with their therapist between sessions. In contrast to the Black Dog project, they don't receive any feedback or response until the next session. Initially, it raised questions of boundaries and dependency for me, particularly when they said they would demand that any other therapist (they were thinking of changing) also do this. I didn't even stop to consider the unthinkable which happened when the therapist passed his/her phone along to someone else (not a therapist). All journalling entries then went to this third person who didn't pass them on. As you can imagine, the potential for distress in that situation proved significant.
A timely project. It will interesting to see how it turns out, particularly in terms of management of confidentiality because, quite coincidentally, someone recently mentioned that they do this kind of thing with their therapist between sessions. In contrast to the Black Dog project, they don't receive any feedback or response until the next session. Initially, it raised questions of boundaries and dependency for me, particularly when they said they would demand that any other therapist (they were thinking of changing) also do this. I didn't even stop to consider the unthinkable which happened when the therapist passed his/her phone along to someone else (not a therapist). All journalling entries then went to this third person who didn't pass them on. As you can imagine, the potential for distress in that situation proved significant.
