Mehrotra Seema, Kumar Satish, Sudhir Paulomi, Rao Girish N, Thirthalli Jagadisha, Gandotra Aditi
Department of Clinical Psychology, NIMHANS, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
Department of Epidemiology, NIMHANS, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
Indian J Psychol Med. 2017 Sep-Oct;39(5):707-711. doi: 10.4103/IJPSYM.IJPSYM_151_17.
The past one decade has witnessed a boom in the availability of Internet-based self-help apps in the field of mental health. Several apps have emerged that aim to provide information and strategies to empower individuals with self-help approaches to deal with issues and concerns related to mental health. A large number of these apps in developing countries are likely to be those which depend entirely on the users to go over the self-help program on their own (unguided internet-based self-help). Only a few apps add a component of periodic professional contact/technical support through phone/email or other means to supplement the self-help strategies suggested in the app that the user is expected to utilize. This scenario poses several challenges in use of unguided self-help apps for mental health. This paper enumerates some of these challenges for potential users of the apps from the perspective of clinicians. These range from difficulties in choosing the right app, limited scope for contextualization, and motivation management to awareness about when to step up to a higher intensity intervention. Despite these challenges, unguided self-help apps can serve important purposes, and hence we propose a few recommendations to address such challenges.
在过去十年中，心理健康领域基于互联网的自助应用程序大量涌现。出现了几款旨在提供信息和策略的应用程序，通过自助方法使个人有能力应对与心理健康相关的问题和担忧。在发展中国家，大量此类应用程序可能完全依赖用户自行浏览自助程序（无指导的基于互联网的自助）。只有少数应用程序通过电话、电子邮件或其他方式添加定期专业联系/技术支持的组件，以补充用户预期使用的应用程序中建议的自助策略。这种情况给使用无指导的心理健康自助应用程序带来了诸多挑战。本文从临床医生的角度为这些应用程序的潜在用户列举了其中一些挑战。这些挑战包括选择合适应用程序的困难、情境化范围有限、动机管理以及意识到何时升级到更高强度干预等。尽管存在这些挑战，无指导的自助应用程序仍可发挥重要作用，因此我们提出了一些应对此类挑战的建议。
