List #11: Psychology and Surveillance Capitalism, & the Digital Future of Mental Healthcare
What am I reading?
💊The digital future of mental healthcare and its workforce: a report on a mental health stakeholder engagement to inform the Topol Review, Tom Foley and James Woollard, NHS (UK), and a counter-point from psychotherapist James Barnes this Twitter thread
🌈 LGBTQ+ Youth Prefer to Seek Mental Health Help Digitally, Emily Dreyfuss, WIRED (June 2019)
Scholarship
💲Psychology and Surveillance Capitalism: The Risk of Pushing Mental Health Apps During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Lisa Cosgrove
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth technologies and mental health apps have been promoted to manage distress in the public and to augment existing mental health services… This analysis reveals that mental health apps may take individuals at their most vulnerable and make them part of a hidden supply chain for the marketplace. Drawing from the frameworks of disaster and surveillance capitalism, we also use a humanistic psychology lens to identify the ethical entanglements and the unintended consequences of promoting and using this technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
📱 Mobile health applications for mental illnesses: An Asian context, Huijun Li, Asian Journal of Psychiatry (December 2020)
“Evidence indicates that a majority of the world’s population, including traditionally underserved populations and low- and middle-income countries, has access to mobile technologies (phones, tablets, mobile devices).”
😷 How mental health care should change as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic Carmen Moreno, The Lancet Psychiatry
“Community monitoring and mental health screening could be implemented in selected groups, or digital health and digital phenotyping could be used to switch from individual-based approaches to population-wide screening… [T]here are opportunities for digital services to track health via passive and active monitoring. These tools have promise, but the long-term usefulness of these complementary therapies is unclear in view of data suggesting poor adherence without human support.”
Some of my own work of late…
⚖ Expert Witness Statement to the Victorian Royal Commission on Mental Health, on the digitisation and virtualisation of mental health services in my (currently locked-down) home state, Victoria, Australia.