Assoc. Prof. Alexey Pavlichenko, MD, PhD (Psychiatry), Russia

Senior Lecturer, Education Centre, Mental Health Clinic No. 1 n.a. N.A. Alekseev, Moscow, Russia

Digital Mental Health: how can modern technologies improve the management of severe mental disorders?

Abstract:
There are big differences between how patients and health care professionals perceive the symptoms of severe mental disorders, thelevel of their severity, and priorities of treatment outcomes (Baune BT, 2019). Modern technologies have demonstrated the new frontiers in psychiatry. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, offer clinicians and patients the new ways of providing and receiving clinical treatment, monitoring progress, and increasing understanding of psychiatric illnesses (Hategan A, 2019). The category “digital mental health” includes different technological domains, such as mobile health (mHealth), health information technology, telehealth and wearable medical devices. mHealth includes mobile apps, which can help individuals to promote healthy living, to gain access to useful information, and, in some circumstances,even to receive care or manage their own health via devices. There is an increasing number of initiatives aimed to adapt psychotherapeutic treatments to Internet platforms (Hidalgo-Mazzei D et al., 2015). On the other hand, most of the current smartphone apps cover a small percentage of psychoeducational contents, revealing an overall poor evidence-based quality (Hidalgo-Mazzei D et al., 2017). The guidelines to get better understanding of the nature, correlates and implications of mood and mood instability have been proposed (Faurholt-Jepsen M, 2019). Moreover, digital phenotyping involving the collecting sensor, keyboard, as well as voice and speech data from smartphones to measure behavior, cognition, and mood could become a potential path to the measurement-based care (Insel T, 2017).