APA: With digital mental health going mainstream, will/ should psychologists be able to “prescribe” interventions?

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Men­tal health, meet ven­ture cap­i­tal (APA):

Until recent­ly, men­tal health was a rel­a­tive blip on the radar of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists. But over the past few years, and par­tic­u­lar­ly since the onset of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, pri­vate investors have made a dra­mat­ic run for this space, pour­ing $3.1 bil­lion into men­tal health ven­tures by the third quar­ter of 2021 alone, accord­ing to Rock Health, a seed fund that sup­ports star­tups work­ing in dig­i­tal health. That rep­re­sents a third of all dig­i­tal health fund­ing for 2021, more than 7 times the amount of fund­ing placed in such ven­tures in 2015.

The rea­sons for this boom are clear. The pan­dem­ic unleashed enor­mous new men­tal health needs, with anx­i­ety and depres­sion rates among U.S. adults sky­rock­et­ing from 11% in 2019 to 42% in Decem­ber 2020, accord­ing to the U.S. Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion. COVID also brought more peo­ple to tele­health and oth­er tech options for treat­ment, and celebri­ties’ pub­lic admis­sions of their own strug­gles helped des­tig­ma­tize men­tal health in the pub­lic eye … The new inter­ven­tions tar­get a wide range of con­di­tions, includ­ing anx­i­ety, depres­sion, insom­nia, trau­ma, and sub­stance use, and a num­ber aim to reduce stress and improve well-being through mind­ful­ness, med­i­ta­tion, and weight loss apps…

Is the rise in fund­ing a fad that will dis­ap­pear once the pan­dem­ic is bet­ter con­trolled or when peo­ple tire of using these prod­ucts? Giv­en the cur­rent lack of reg­u­la­tion, how can peo­ple choose inter­ven­tions that are effec­tive? And what about uptake? In one study of 93 of the most fre­quent­ly installed unguid­ed men­tal health apps—apps whose imple­men­ta­tion relies sole­ly on the user’s motivation—just 3.9% of ini­tial users con­tin­ued using them after 14 days (Jour­nal of Med­ical Inter­net Research, Vol. 21, No. 9, 2019)…

APA is keep­ing abreast of these devel­op­ments and cre­at­ing pro­grams and prod­ucts to help prac­ti­tion­ers, tech­nol­o­gists, and con­sumers under­stand and nav­i­gate this rapid­ly evolv­ing space. The asso­ci­a­tion is also work­ing with stake­hold­ers to address the fact that, at present, FDA-approved products—even those with a psy­chol­o­gy basis—need to be pre­scribed but that most psy­chol­o­gists lack this authority.

To help fix this prob­lem, APA and oth­ers “are work­ing to devel­op a more inno­v­a­tive reg­u­la­to­ry mod­el that fits these soft­wares bet­ter and doesn’t use the word ‘pre­scrip­tion,’” said Vaile Wright, PhD, APA’s senior direc­tor of health care inno­va­tion. To aid in this effort, in Sep­tem­ber 2021, the FDA des­ig­nat­ed APA an “expert part­ner orga­ni­za­tion,” which will allow the asso­ci­a­tion to pro­vide exper­tise on behav­ioral change tech­nol­o­gy and methodology.

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