The growing field of digital psychiatry: current evidence and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality

🤖 Plain-English Summary

As the COVID-19 pandemic has largely increased the utilization of telehealth, mobile mental health technologies - such as smartphone apps, vir-tual reality, chatbots, and social media - have also gained attention. We conclude that the new technological capabilities of smartphones, artificial intelligence, social media and virtual reality are already changing mental health care in unforeseen and exciting ways, each accompanied by an early but promising evidence base.

🔑 Key Findings

• These digital health technologies offer the potential of accessible and scalable interventions that can augment traditional care.
• In this paper, we provide a comprehensive update on the overall field of digital psychiatry, covering three areas.
• First, we outline the relevance of recent technological advances to mental health research and care, by detailing how smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence and virtual reality present new opportunities for "digital phenotyping" and remote intervention.

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