Innovation: Get Therapy through your iPhone

Excel­lent arti­cle about an emerg­ing “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care:

Mari­enti­na Got­sis, media lab man­ag­er at USC, start­ed think­ing about design­ing apps with ther­a­peu­tic poten­tial when she real­ized that her phone had joined her wal­let and keys on the small list of things she nev­er left home with­out. “It’s what keeps peo­ple con­nect­ed, func­tion­al, feel­ing safe and enter­tained. So why not use what peo­ple hold on to close to deliv­er behav­ioral interventions?”

It’s the kind of inno­va­tion that Kath­leen Car­roll, a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Yale, says may be a “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care. These apps are part of the “brain fit­ness” indus­try, a cat­e­go­ry that includes com­put­er­ized mem­o­ry exer­cis­es and cog­ni­tive-impair­ment assess­ment pro­grams, and that Sharp­Brains, a com­pa­ny that ana­lyzes the indus­try, esti­mates to have grown 35 per­cent in 2009, to $295 million.

The idea of get­ting coun­sel­ing from a com­put­er or smart­phone may seem strange, but it’s been in the works for years. In 2006, the British Nation­al Insti­tute for Health and Clin­i­cal Excel­lence rec­om­mend­ed two pro­grams, Fear Fight­er and Beat­ing the Blues, as first-line treat­ments for mild-to-mod­er­ate anx­i­ety and depression.

Full arti­cle deserves read­ing: Get Ther­a­py through your iPhone (The Dai­ly Beast)