Beyond the clinic: Can digital therapeutics (DTx) help boost mental health in the workforce at scale?

Hop­ing to Avoid Pear’s Fate, Behav­ioral Health-Focused DTx Com­pa­nies Look to Employ­er Mar­ket (Behav­ioral Health Busi­ness): The dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics (DTx) indus­try is at a cross­roads after one of the most promi­nent com­pa­nies in the space, Pear Ther­a­peu­tics, filed for bank­rupt­cy ear­li­er this year. The tur­moil comes after DTx began catch­ing on in the behav­ioral health…

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Clinicians and academics should engage users when reviewing mental health apps, study finds

Study: Pro­fes­sion­al, con­sumer opin­ions dif­fer on men­tal health app qual­i­ty (Mobi­Health News): Researchers found low agree­ment between pro­fes­sion­als’ and con­sumers’ reviews of men­tal health apps. The study, pub­lished in JMIR, assessed 11 men­tal health apps using web sur­veys admin­is­tered between Decem­ber 2020 and April 2021. The apps assessed includ­ed Breethe, Calm, Head­space, Insight Timer Meditation,…

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Trend: Harnessing digital tech to improve mental health and wellness

From mind­ful­ness apps to vir­tu­al ther­a­py ses­sions, dig­i­tal tools offer instant access to well­ness resources (The Globe and Mail): In 2015, Brie Code was work­ing at lead­ing video game com­pa­ny Ubisoft as lead arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pro­gram­mer when she real­ized that many peo­ple she knew – about half, by her esti­ma­tion – found video games boring.

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Headspace and Ginger merge to expand and scale up digital mental health

Head­space and Gin­ger are merg­ing to form Head­space Health (TechCrunch): Med­i­ta­tion app Head­space this morn­ing announced plans to merge with on-demand men­tal health ser­vice Gin­ger. Bar­ring unfore­seen reg­u­la­to­ry road­blocks, the two com­pa­nies will com­bine to form Head­space Health. The new orga­ni­za­tion would sport a com­bined val­ue of $3 bil­lion and a head­count of more than 800.…

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Update: Understanding Brain Health via Cosmological Health, and vice versa

Wel­come to a new edi­tion of Sharp­Brains’ e‑newsletter, fea­tur­ing fas­ci­nat­ing find­ings, books and resources for life­long brain health. #1. “The human brain (sec­tion; left image above) func­tions thanks to its wide neu­ronal net­work that is deemed to con­tain approx­i­mate­ly 69 bil­lion neu­rons. On the oth­er hand, the observ­able uni­verse (sec­tion sim­u­la­tion; right image) can count…

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