Do school smartphone bans actually save schools money?

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Schools spend the equivalent of three full-time staff managing phone use, whether or not students are allowed to have phones in school. This new study asks if banning smartphones actually improves pupils’ wellbeing or saves money for schools.

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Smartphone bans in schools are not associated with better mental wellbeing or reduced screen-time out of school

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Emma Sullivan summarises a cross-sectional observational study investigating associations between school smartphone policies and mental wellbeing in young people.

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Apps for depression and anxiety: big new meta-analysis supports effectiveness

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In their debut blog, Lee Valentine summarises a large-scale updated meta-analysis investigating the effectiveness of mental health apps for depression and anxiety.

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Is brief text messaging effective to reduce repeat hospital-treated self-harm?

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Amelia Mullett summarises an Australian RCT on the efficacy of a short message service brief contact intervention (SMS-SOS) in reducing repetition of hospital-treated self-harm.

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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?

Relaxed,Mature,Old,60s,Woman,Middle,Aged,Female,Holding,Smartphone

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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