This week we discussed the effectiveness of E-mental health. We mentioned how eMH is thought be equally as effective or even more effective than in-person care. I think that eMH is more beneficial than these conventional therapies. There are many disadvantages and advantages that explain this.
We see that eMH can have many benefits over in-person care. For example, patients being treated using eMH have a greater treatment adherence,reduced anxiety, and less PTSD symptoms. eMh also has varying models of care that can differ program to program. Low intensity models involve case review and follow up as well as telepsychiatric consultation to primary care. Moderate intensity models are integrate mental health screenings with therapy on site. They also include telepsychiatric consultation, healthcare education, and training of staff to improve patient outcomes. Then there are high intensity models that use collaborative care using STP and ATP.
A program utilizing a low intensity model as we mentioned in lecture is PTSD coach. This is an app that I find especially interesting and can relate to considering many of my family members are military veterans and I think this would benefit them.This app is available for veterans and servicemembers who have PTSD. It provides tools to help manage this disorder. It can help manage symptoms related to the disease along with other stress. The app provides self-assessments, symptom-tracking tools, education materials, and provides coping skills to help with stress. Patients take their self-assessment and if the assessment scores indicate they may have PTSD, and if they are VA patients, the App can be used to share the scores with your VA health care team. If the score is severe and they are not a VA patient, this app will provide options for seeking professional treatment.
Therefore, we can see this program most likely follows a low intensity model because it is an mobile-based intervention that allows patients to educate themselves and then if help by a healthcare professional is needed, they are given the means to do so.
I find the PTSD coach application to be very interesting because it is specifically targeted at veterans struggling with PTSD, so most likely this means they have observed or experienced combat. I think this is a great strength to the application as this may help to narrow and strengthen the treatment options. Additionally, if this app utilizes a community board as many of the e-mental health apps I have reviewed to, you know many of the users will have very similar experiences. I find the VA's role in mental health fields to be very interesting. Recently, in my Clinical Psychology class I learned that the experience of "shell shock" now known as PTSD led to the VA requesting for more training of clinical psychologists and gave emphasis to the scientist-clinician model of Clinical Psychology, as opposed to the primarily research model that had been emphasized previously. The VA and treatment of PTSD largely influenced the role of Clinical Psychologist as clinicians.
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