In this conversation we chat to Dr Lou Farrer about how clinicians are implementing digital mental health into practice, their attitudes, perceptions and their role in improving access to mental health care.
“What I wanted to understand is what is the on-the-ground evidence, what is the everyday experience of clinicians who are using digital tools in their practice? And on the other side, what’s getting in the way of clinicians being able to effectively use these sorts of tools in their practice?”
Digital technologies and platforms have the potential to play an important role in improving the mental health of the population and the delivery of mental health services. Yet, despite established evidence supporting the benefits of well-designed digital mental health – improved access, early intervention and prevention, and opportunities to bridge the supply-demand gap, for instance – digital mental health continues to remain underutilised in practice.
It’s an issue that clinical psychologist and Senior Research Fellow at The Australian National University’s Centre for Mental Health Research, Dr Lou Farrer, set out to investigate as part of her latest research project.
As Dr Farrer explains, while barriers preventing the more widespread use of digital mental health in practice persist, the opportunity to make significant improvement to mental health services continues to be missed.
“What I wanted to understand is what is the on-the-ground evidence, what is the everyday experience of clinicians who are using digital tools in their practice? And on the other side, what’s getting in the way of clinicians being able to effectively use these sorts of tools in their practice?”
– Dr Lou Farrer
As a researcher involved in evaluating MoodGym and e-couch, two of Australia’s earliest digital mental health programs, Dr Farrer was keen to explore clinician attitudes and behaviours around digital mental health some 20 years on amid the proliferation of mental health apps and tools that we now see today.
But with the start of her research coinciding with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Farrer very quickly had to turn her focus to the role that telehealth had to play in the delivery of mental health.
In this episode of Digital Mental Health Musings we talk to Dr Farrer about what she has learned about how clinicians responded to the implementation of telehealth through the quantitative survey responses of more than 500 mental health practitioners. We talk about what those findings can reveal about the adoption and roll out of digital mental health more broadly and the types of clinician attitudes and perceptions that can lead to greater engagement and integration of digital mental health in the clinical setting to optimise its use in the community.
Dr Farrer also explains how clinician knowledge and attitudes around digital mental health can play a powerful role in who gets to access mental health.
“Clinicians are incredibly important gate keepers of digital mental health,” says Dr Farrer.
“[Their] attitudes towards digital tools and the use of digital mental health programs have such a profound influence on the attitudes of clients. So, when people engage with digital tools, if they’re working with a clinician who integrates them masterfully in their clinical practice, utilises them to their full capacity and uses in them in the really powerful and clever ways they were designed to be used … it’s quite clear to me that … the clients they worked with saw the power and the value of those tools as well”.
– Dr Lou Farrer
Who is Dr Lou Farrer?
Dr Lou Farrer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Mental Health Research at The Australian National University. She holds an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award to examine how digital mental health tools are used in clinical practice. Dr Farrer has developed and evaluated the effectiveness and implementation of several digital mental health programs in community, clinical, and educational settings.
Check out some of the resources we discussed in this episode:
Moodgym: https://moodgym.com.au/
eCouch: https://ecouch.com.au/
Telehealth use by mental health professionals during COVID-19: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35360958/
The Factors Associated with Telehealth Use and Avoidance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Survey: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36649254/
Read more of Dr Lou Farrer’s publications here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/farrer-lm#publications
Contact Dr Farrer and register your interest in participating in her research by emailing louse.farrer@anu.edu.au.
Listen to the full conversation below. You can also access Digital Mental Health Musings on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Deezer.
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