Mental health for digital natives in the covid era: Shouldn’t remote counselling be the first line of engagement & treatment?

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The ben­e­fits of remote con­sul­ta­tion for men­tal health treat­ment (Health Europa):

Thor­b­jorg Vig­fus­dót­tir, a cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist by train­ing, spent 12 years as a politi­cian in her native Ice­land with the goal of direct­ing her knowl­edge on the devel­op­ment of the brain into edu­ca­tion and pub­lic pol­i­cy. After leav­ing pol­i­tics to form a com­pa­ny pro­vid­ing remote speech ther­a­py in Ice­landic schools, she was found­ed Kara Con­nect, an online con­sul­ta­tion plat­form enabling ther­a­pists and clin­i­cians to pro­vide remote care and treat­ment, which was recent­ly adopt­ed by the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty Hos­pi­tal of Ice­land (Land­spí­tali).

What are the key ben­e­fits of remote treat­ment for young peo­ple in need of men­tal health support?

Young peo­ple now are dig­i­tal natives: they find it use­less to go into a phys­i­cal wait­ing room and wait to see some­body that they don’t know; they pre­fer to do it this way. The thresh­old for get­ting help is eas­i­er when tech­nol­o­gy is involved; and many young peo­ple feel a degree of stig­ma about access­ing men­tal health sup­port, so it can help to con­nect online at least in the first instance, before you meet. It helps to build trust between the patient and ther­a­pist, for exam­ple if some­body is iso­lat­ed or bul­lied, of if they need to build trust with child pro­tec­tion ser­vices, the tech­nol­o­gy grants them eas­i­er access. It also elim­i­nates the issue of trans­port: they don’t need to pay for the bus or spend time in a wait­ing room filled with old­er peo­ple; it’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent access point for these young people.

Has the unprece­dent­ed onset of a glob­al pan­dem­ic sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect­ed the men­tal health of young peo­ple? Are you see­ing a high­er uptake in men­tal health services?

Yes, we are. There has been a doc­u­ment­ed increase in stu­dents at school and uni­ver­si­ty report­ing anx­i­ety and depres­sion. Many school psy­chol­o­gists and coun­sel­lors are adopt­ing remote con­sul­ta­tion tech­nolo­gies to reach these kids, to keep them going to school, and to allow them to talk to some­one about how they’re feel­ing. I think it’s real­ly impor­tant that schools, which may not be open­ing in autumn, again, keep in close touch with these kids: the men­tal health of young peo­ple is effec­tive­ly anoth­er pan­dem­ic right now; and the increase will act as a strain on the sys­tem as a whole, because we don’t have enough men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als. It may be that, using tele­health tech­nolo­gies, we can enable ther­a­pists to offer short­er ses­sions more often; and to use more of their time of these pro­fes­sion­als on con­duct­ing ses­sions than on administration…

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