What I’m reading…
📩 Amazon opens online pharmacy, shaking up another industry, Joseph Pisani and Tom Murphy, Associated Press, 18 November 2020.
⚕ Big Tech’s latest moves raise health privacy fears, Ulises Ali Mejias, Financial Times (7 Dec 2020)
👩🏽⚕️ Why Doctor’s Hate Their Computers, Atul Gawande, New Yorker (5 November 2020)
📴 The Spooky, Loosely Regulated World of Online Therapy, Molly Osberg and Dhruv Mehrotra, Jezebel (19 February 2020)
In scholarship…
🔬The subjects of digital psychiatry Dörte Bemme, Natassia Brenman and Beth Semel, Somatosphere (October 2020)
🚬 Assessment of the Data Sharing and Privacy Practices of Smartphone Apps for Depression and Smoking Cessation, Kit Huckvale, John Torous, Mark E. Larsen, JAMA Network Open (19 April 2019)
“In this cross-sectional study of 36 top-ranked apps for depression and smoking cessation available in public app stores, 29 transmitted data to services provided by Facebook or Google, but only 12 accurately disclosed this in a privacy policy.”
👁 Digital Phenotyping and Digital Psychotropic Drugs: Mental Health Surveillance Tools That Threaten Human Rights, Lisa Cosgrove et al, (2020) Health and Human Rights 22(3)
Digital technologies and tools hold much promise. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how helpful telehealth platforms and mental health applications (apps) can be in a time of quarantine and social distancing. However, such technologies also pose risks to human rights at both the individual and population levels.
What I’m listening to…
💸 Your mental health for sale? Privacy International, including an interview with Dr David Crepaz-Keay Head of Applied Learning at the Mental Health Foundation
What I’m watching…
🎭 Human Virtuality and Digital Life, Viktor Krebs and Richard Frankel (2020), DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, & the Arts
What I’ve written...
🌐 Automating Mental Health: The Global Promise and Peril, Center for Foreign Relations (25 November 2020)
… the sheer volume and velocity of information that can be shared, undermines technical and institutional transparency, and prevents responsible public governance… Health data might improve public health outcomes, but that same data could be re-purposed not just by government agencies that may leverage that information against the person’s interests, but by a multitude of private parties, such as pharmaceutical companies, insurers and data-brokers.