Did you miss our fourth webinar, Tele-mental health in the digital age: Prospects, pitfalls and provocations for psychological interventions beyond COVID-19?
Don’t worry, watch it now on our YouTube Page!
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a rapid global transition to forms of tele-health – and for us within the discipline and profession of psychology – tele-mental health. While both tele-health programmes and tele-mental health initiatives have been available for several decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an accelerated impetus for the widespread uptake and use of online technology platforms in the delivery of psychological services. Some of this has been related to necessity, as practitioners have attempted to maintain their responsiveness to patients, as well as preserve their own personal income streams. In other instances, many have seen the value of technology in enhancing access to psychological services, that overcomes some of the historical inequities around health information, education and interventions.
But there are also a number of new questions that this transition has raised. What are the new dimensions of ethics and the broad principles of conduct for practitioners under these new conditions? In addition, how efficacious are interventions based on tele-mental health, and how well does patient care and risk management measure up relative to face-to-face interventions? What are the technological dimensions that are both enabling and disabling within these new delivery platforms? How are different practitioners, working in different modalities and from different theoretical perspectives, able or unable to adjust to this new delivery mode? Finally, which psychological needs are best suited to being serviced through these new technologies, and which are less appropriate and amenable to intervention through this medium?
In this webinar, we have several practitioners who are differently located within the profession, and who self-identify as having specific paradigmatic affinities, in dialogue on these prospects, pitfalls and provocations. Given that the effects of COVID-19 are likely to reverberate for some time across all aspects of social life, these are critical points of engagement for practitioners and professionals as the digital age becomes more sedimented in all parts of our lives.