Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Sep 19, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 20, 2018 - Nov 6, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 5, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Assessing people with serious mental illness’ use of mobile and computer devices to support recovery
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental health recovery denotes an individual’s experience of gaining a sense of personal control, striving towards one’s life goals, and meeting one’s needs. Although people with serious mental illness own and use electronic devices for general purposes, knowledge of their current use and interest in future use for supporting mental health recovery remains limited.
Objective:
To identify the applications of smartphones, tablets, and computers that mental health service recipients use and want to use to support their recovery.
Methods:
As a pilot study, we surveyed a convenience sample of 63 mental health service recipients with serious mental illness. The survey assessed current use and interest in the applications of mobile and computer devices to support recovery.
Results:
Listening to music (60%), accessing the internet (59%), and calling (59%) and texting (54%) people were the top functions currently used by participants on their device to support their recovery. Participants expressed interest in learning how to use apps for anxiety/stress management (45%), mood management (45%), monitoring mental health symptoms (43%), cognitive behavioral therapy (40%), sleep (38%), and dialectical behavior therapy (38%) to support their recovery.
Conclusions:
Mental health service recipients currently use general functions, such as listening to music and calling friends, to support recovery. Nevertheless, they report interest in trying more specific illness-management functions.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.