Is Science Right About Digital Psychiatry as an Effective Solution for the Mental Health Care Gap?

Many new digital psychiatry solutions have garnered substantial funding in recent years, but experts are questioning their efficacy and potential harm. These solutions, largely developed by computer scientists and tech entrepreneurs, leverage smartphones and wearable sensors to provide mental health insights and have attracted more than $10 billion in funding worldwide between 2020 and 2022. The United States’ ongoing mental health crisis has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a 25 percent increase in anxiety and depression worldwide, particularly among young people and women.

Numerous consumer-facing mental health apps are available for download, such as Calm, Headspace, Sanvello, Bearable, and Happify. These apps offer personal assistance with guided meditations, mindfulness exercises, anxiety management, and other activities alongside customized wellness plans based on user preferences and lifestyles. Although most of them offer free versions, subscribing for full content and tools could range anywhere from $27.99 to $350 per year. Despite their limited clinical use, non-clinical participants report modest improvements in mindfulness, stress, anxiety, depression, and well-being.

Digital psychiatry solutions also offer software to help clinicians manage their patients better. The TrakStar platform, for instance, helps clinicians oversee transcranial magnetic stimulation, an FDA-approved therapy for major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, migraines, and smoking addiction. It also tracks patient-reported outcomes during treatment to assess efficacy, adverse events, and patient eligibility and insurance coverage. It continues to monitor patients post-treatment through questionnaires in case they relapse and notifies providers if a patient’s condition worsens.

There are also academic and research-led innovations in digital psychiatry, such as the MindLAMP platform, which collects sleep patterns, physical activities, physiological symptoms, call and text logs to offer customized mindfulness, meditation, and breathing interventions. Collaboratively interpreted by clinicians and patients in psychiatric clinics, MindLAMP has been used to digitally provide therapy to patients with schizophrenia, track memory loss in patients with Alzheimer’s, and understand differences in the disease trajectories of bipolar disorder and depression. Likewise, the MindShift CBT app, which is based on cognitive behavioral therapy, challenges patients’ thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes to improve emotional well-being and contains modules to educate and engage users in skill-building exercises to support coping. Furthermore, the app boasts a community forum where users can learn from others’ experiences and provide and receive peer-to-peer support.

For digital psychiatry to thrive, experts say it needs an evidence base to prove clinical benefits or an intervention from regulators to ensure these tools are held accountable to produce data-driven solutions.

 

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