The promise of digital interventions to reduce the disease burden of depression #DepressionSolvingTheToll part 2

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Part 2 in a four-part series on solving the toll of depression on populations. Pim Cuijpers focuses on the opportunities and challenges of digital interventions for depression, looking at guided and unguided digital interventions, and taking a global mental health perspective.

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Is it possible to form a digital therapeutic alliance with a mental health app?

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Jenna Jacob summarises a qualitative study exploring the conceptualisation of the digital therapeutic alliance in the context of mental health apps that require no human support.

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Smartphone application for dental anxiety in adolescents

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In this blog we look at a RCT investigating the effect of a smartphone App on dental anxiety, communication, cooperation, and satisfaction among Brazilian adolescent patients. The findings show a reduction in anxiety from 22.8% to 6.5% in the test group compared with a reduction form 20.7% to 18.8% in the control group.

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Apps to support the mental health of young people: flashy and available versus evidence-based and hidden?

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Belinda Platt highlights a new review of mental health apps for young people, which finds there are many apps which seem appealing to young people but have no evidence-base, but only a handful of apps with a sound evidence-base which are available to young people.

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Digital mental health technologies: useful, usable, and safe?

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Cara Richardson and Stephanie Allan summarise a recent paper focusing on the growing field of digital psychiatry and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality.

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When it comes to youth mental health, let’s focus on screen-use not screen-time

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In her debut blog, Linda Kaye summarises a paper that presents a youth mental health research priority setting exercise, which finds that research should be focussing on screen use not screen time.

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Can smartphone apps help female adolescents who self-harm?

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Natalie Kashirsky summarises a qualitative study finding that young people think “smartphone apps are cool”, but possibly unhelpful for coping with self-harm.

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Remote measurement technologies for depression in young people: scalable solution or overplayed potential? #ActiveIngredientsMH

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In her debut blog, Annabel Walsh summarises her #ActiveIngredientsMH project which explored the use of remote measurement technologies for depression in children and young people.

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SlowMo: an app to improve thinking biases in people experiencing paranoia

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Imogen Bell blogs about a recent randomised controlled trial of the SlowMo app, which aimed to slow down thinking patterns and correct interpretation biases in people experiencing paranoia.

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