Technological and Digital Interventions for Mental Health and Wellbeing: Useful, Usable, and Safe?

Dear Colleagues,

New digital tools and technologies are being continuously developed and integrated into society and clinical care. The advantages of digital health interventions (DHI) (e.g., internet programs, apps, wearables, robotic systems etc.) include their accessibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and high treatment fidelity. The use of digital technologies can serve multiple functions in DHIs, including the facilitation of health communication, psychoeducation, screening, diagnosis and digital phenotyping, symptom management, collection of digital patient-reported outcomes, behaviour change monitoring, self-help content delivery, therapeutic treatment, prevention relapse, and many others.

Intervention acceptability and user engagement are central to the feasibility and successful implementation of DHIs. Generally, intervention acceptability is a multi-component construct and a key component of the design, implementation, and evaluation of all healthcare interventions, but often lacks robust evaluation (Sekhon et al., 2018). Previous research has highlighted the importance of understanding individuals’ motivations and approaches towards DHIs, as these can shape users’ engagement with the intervention (Patel et al., 2020), as well as the importance of addressing the impact of social context on the acceptability of digital interventions (Perski & Short, 2021).

Social sciences’ approaches, methods, and frameworks are well equipped to provide such analyses (Ruppert et al., 2013; Henwood & Marent, 2019) and highlight key factors that can determine digital interventions’ implementation, uptake, and use.

We are especially interested in the ways in which social sciences approaches, knowledge, or methods can explore the advantages and disadvantages of technological and digital interventions for mental health and wellbeing. For example, how can approaches in critical digital health inform their design, implementation, and evaluation? 

Suggested topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• A focus on ethical standards: ethical dilemmas for different stakeholders and ethical implementation (Wykes et al. 2019; Skorburg & Yim, 2021), and individuals’ sense of data generated via their interactions with digital technologies.
• A focus on intervention acceptability and intervention adoption: acceptability and appropriateness of ehealth solutions, and the impact of sociostructural factors in accessing and taking up digital health interventions.
• A focus on users’ engagement: the characteristics of disengagement and effective engagement in digital interventions, philosophical approaches that theorise the lived experience of using digital technologies, impact of sociocultural contexts on users’ behaviour, and barriers and facilitators to engagement with digital mental health interventions.
• A focus on mental health interventions with minority/marginalised populations and mental health in the context of gender, disabilities and sexualities, in addition to social disadvantages.

Dr. Maria Armaou
Guest Editor

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