American-Psychological-Association

How much should you trust BetterHelp, Talkspace, Cerebral and other mental health start-ups touted by celebrities?

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When Pat Paulson’s son told her he was feel­ing anx­ious and depressed at col­lege, Paul­son went through her Blue Cross Blue Shield provider direc­to­ry and start­ed call­ing men­tal health ther­a­pists. No providers in the Wis­con­sin city where her son’s uni­ver­si­ty is locat­ed had open­ings. So she bought a month­ly sub­scrip­tion to Bet­ter­Help, a Moun­tain View, Cal­i­for­nia, com­pa­ny that links peo­ple to ther­a­pists online.

Her son felt uncom­fort­able with his first Bet­ter­Help ther­a­pist. After wait­ing sev­er­al weeks, he saw a sec­ond ther­a­pist, whom he liked. But she wasn’t avail­able the fol­low­ing week. [Read more…] about How much should you trust Bet­ter­Help, Talk­space, Cere­bral and oth­er men­tal health start-ups tout­ed by celebrities?

New Review of Neurofeedback Treatment for ADHD — Current State of the Science

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neurofeedback adhd reviewsNeu­ro­feed­back — also known as EEG Biofeed­back — is an approach for treat­ing ADHD in which indi­vid­u­als are pro­vid­ed real-time feed­back on their brain­wave activ­i­ty and taught to alter their typ­i­cal EEG pat­tern to one that is con­sis­tent with a focused and atten­tive state. Accord­ing to neu­ro­feed­back pro­po­nents, this often results in improved atten­tion and reduced hyperactive/impulsive behavior.

Sev­er­al years ago I sum­ma­rized the sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment — see here — and not­ed that [Read more…] about New Review of Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment for ADHD — Cur­rent State of the Science

Videogames for Cognitive Training?

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There were a few inter­est­ing research papers pre­sent­ed at the last  Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion con­ven­tions around the theme:

Play­ing Video Games Offers Learn­ing Across Life Span, Say Studies
— Skills Trans­fer to Class­room, Sur­gi­cal Pro­ce­dures, Sci­en­tif­ic Think­ing (press release).

Prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing study was that of 303 laparo­scop­ic sur­geons, which “showed that sur­geons who played video games requir­ing spa­tial skills and hand dex­ter­i­ty and then per­formed a drill test­ing these skills were sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster at their first attempt and across all 10 tri­als than the sur­geons who did not the play video games first.”

The note goes fur­ther to explain the impli­ca­tions from this research:

“The big pic­ture is that there are sev­er­al dimen­sions on which games have effects, includ­ing the amount they are played, the con­tent of each game, what you have to pay atten­tion to on the screen, and how you con­trol the motions,” said Gen­tile. “This means that games are not “good’ or bad,’ but are pow­er­ful edu­ca­tion­al tools and have many effects we might not have expect­ed they could.”

Very thought­ful quote. Please note a few ele­ments about [Read more…] about Videogames for Cog­ni­tive Training?