Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health

Date Submitted: Dec 28, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 27, 2021

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Digital Mental Health Challenges and the Horizon Ahead for Solutions

Balcombe L, De Leo D

Digital Mental Health Challenges and the Horizon Ahead for Solutions

JMIR Ment Health 2021;8(3):e26811

DOI: 10.2196/26811

PMID: 33779570

PMCID: 8077937

Digital mental health challenges and the horizon ahead for solutions

  • Luke Balcombe; 
  • Diego De Leo

ABSTRACT

The overwhelming demand and inadequate supply of mental health resources during the COVID-19 pandemic presents opportunities for digital and data-oriented tools to fill this gap and, in the process, demonstrate capabilities to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Mental health service providers are grappling with the challenges of integrating modern digitalization and data-driven methods and solutions to investigate the barriers impeding population mental health and solve problems with prediction and risk modelling. Firstly, engagement by functional specialists with digital solutions and topics will be required for technologies to become embedded in standard clinical care. Secondly, human-computer interaction will be required to boost the impact of contact and assessment by health services (e.g., screening and tracking with the assistance of machine learning algorithms). Thirdly, a better understanding of the psychology (especially the digital therapeutic alliance) in human-computer interaction is required. Human patient and computerized therapeutic interventions (e.g., artificial intelligence and virtual reality) require rigorous evaluation. There are opportunities arising from integrating algorithms, digital platforms and solutions into population research to improve therapeutic outcomes. Although mature products cannot yet be reasonably expected, scrutiny of digitalization developments suggests that advantages outweigh disadvantages in terms of social justice, assessment/diagnosis accuracy and user experience. An integrated blueprint, roadmap, digital platforms, a well-connected learning environment, and a positive and inclusive culture intent on gritting through ethical challenges paves a pathway for increasing the reliability and validity of digital solutions while providing for increased resilience. A scale up in the hybrid model of care requires development of eminent products and services as well as skillsets to use and maintain it.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Balcombe L, De Leo D

Digital Mental Health Challenges and the Horizon Ahead for Solutions

JMIR Ment Health 2021;8(3):e26811

DOI: 10.2196/26811

PMID: 33779570

PMCID: 8077937

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.