JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The therapeutic alliance, the relationship that develops between a therapist and a client/patient, is a critical factor in the outcome of psychological therapy. As mental healthcare is increasingly adopting digital technologies and offering therapeutic interventions that may not involve human therapists, the notion of a therapeutic alliance in digital mental healthcare requires exploration. To date, there has been some incipient work on developing measures to assess conceptualisations of a digital therapeutic alliance for mental health apps. However, the few measures that have been proposed have all more or less been derivatives of measures from psychology used to assess the therapeutic alliance in traditional face-to-face therapy. In this conceptual paper we explore one such instrument that has been proposed in the literature, the mARM, and examine it through a human-computer interaction (HCI) lens. Via this process, we show how theories from HCI can play a role in shaping or generating a more suitable, purpose-built measure of the DTA, and we contribute suggestions on how HCI methods and knowledge can be used to foster the DTA in mental health apps.