Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Aug 22, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 31, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 6, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Ethics of Digital Mental Health During COVID-19: Crisis and Opportunities
ABSTRACT
Viewpoint Article Abstract: ocial distancing measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated the adoption and implementation of digital mental health tools. Psychiatry and therapy sessions are being conducted via video-conferencing platforms and digital mental health tools for monitoring and treatment are exploding in use. This rapid shift to telehealth during the pandemic has given additional urgency to the ethical challenges presented by digital mental health tools. Regulatory standards have been relaxed to allow this shift to socially-distanced mental health care. It is imperative to ensure that implementation of digital mental health tools, especially in this context of crisis, is guided by ethical principles and abides by professional codes of conduct. This article examines key areas for an ethical path forward in this digital mental health revolution: 1) privacy and data protection; 2) safety and accountability; and 3) access and fairness.
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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.