The Normalization of Tele-Therapy
It was back in 2014 when Talkspace founders decided to place huge see through bubbles in the middle of New York City to crush the stigma of going to therapy, and attract attention to their new online teletherapy platform. While one in five Americans suffers from a mental health condition, nearly two-thirds of people with a known psychiatric disorder never seek help from a health-care professional because of stigma, discrimination and neglect.1,2
The Mental Health Pandemic pushes therapy online
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a second pandemic, a mental health one. Clinicians report a three-fold increase in depression and anxiety rates. Increased social isolation, financial stressors and a general sense of instability have driven both clinicians and patients to move the therapist’s couch to an online space. This was enabled by new emergency regulations and reimbursement codes issued, similar to other telehealth services.3 Tele-therapy has reached sky-high levels of consumption and therapy has become more popular than ever. Was therapy meant to be online this whole time?
Psychotherapy 101
When asking if virtual therapy will mimic the long-lasting effects of psychotherapy we must return to its origins. Psychoanalysis was born in the end of the 19th century, when Sigmund Freud began prescribing his patients the “talking cure” to alleviate psychosomatic, anxious and depressive symptoms. The fundamental building block was setting. The same therapist, with the same patient, sitting for 45 minute sessions in the same room several times a week. Since then, more modern schools of thought in psychotherapy emerged, all adhering to a similar notion: patients need stability and relationship to drive meaningful and long lasting improvement in clinical outcomes.4
In the past, online communication with clinicians was viewed as a supplement to ‘real’ treatment. As new reimbursement conditions allowed clinicians to get paid for this new form of treatment, Therapy 2.0 emerged, employing online chats as an integral part of therapy. This ongoing virtual communication allowed for more continuous and flexible interaction with patients and closer monitoring of symptoms in their natural environment.
Psychiatry 3.0
According to Prof. Larry Davidson, Director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, “over 75 years of research suggest that the relationship is the most ameliorative factor in healing. The next jump in mental health technology would be in the monitoring of symptoms and the augmentation of therapeutic relationships’’. Using AI, sensors and wearable technologies, we may be able to get a more holistic view of our patients in real time. Therapy 3.0 will focus on proactive real time monitoring, offering clinicians a 360 degree view of patients’ physiological and mental parameters based on behavioral health data accumulated over time by them in their home. Novel brain sensing technologies might take this one step further, by providing remote clinicians the inner working of their patients’ mind in real time.
We at LionBird are curious to see more and more entrepreneurs disrupting the psycho-therapeutic status quo, looking at the patient not only through their electronic medical records, but also through their behavior, cognitions, and physiological measurements at home, and how novel methods of treatment may be implemented remotely.
