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Digital mental health apps and the therapeutic alliance: Initial review
Abstract
Background As mental healthcare expands to smartphone apps and other technologies that may offer therapeutic interventions without therapist involved, it is important to assess the impact of non-traditional therapeutic relationships. Aims To determine if there were any meaningful data regarding the digital therapeutic alliance in smartphone interventions for serious mental illnesses. Method A literature search was conducted in four databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase and Web of Science). Results There were five studies that discuss the therapeutic alliance when a mobile application intervention is involved in therapy. However, in none of the studies was the digital therapeutic alliance the primary outcome. The studies looked at different mental health conditions, had different duration of technology use and used different methods for assessing the therapeutic alliance. Conclusions Assessing and optimising the digital therapeutic alliance holds the potential to make tools such as smartphone apps more effective and improve adherence to their use. However, the heterogeneous nature of the five studies we identified make it challenging to draw conclusions at this time. A measure is required to evaluate the digital therapeutic alliance.
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2019.
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2019.
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Date
2019
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Article
Subject
Information storage and retrieval, Mental disorders, Telemedicine
Citation
Henson, P., Wisniewski, H., Hollis, C. P., Keshavan, M. & Torous, J. (2019). Digital mental health apps and the therapeutic alliance: Initial review. BJPsych Open, 5 (1), pp.e15.
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© The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2019
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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