The digital mental health revolution: Opportunities and risks

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue on digital mental health. The promise of digital, mobile, and connected technologies to advance mental health, and especially psychiatric rehabilitation, continues to rapidly evolve. New sensors and data, such as those derived from increasingly ubiquitous smartphones, offer a new window into the functional, social, and emotional experiences of illness and recovery at a personalized and quantified level previously unimaginable (Ben-Zeev & Badiyani, 2016; Free et al., 2013; Torous, Kiang, Lorme, & Onnela, 2016). These new technologies may also help assess and monitor mental health on a population level and provide early interventions and resources to those in need, regardless of their location (East & Havard, 2015). The papers comprising this special issue make important and exciting contributions to the mental health field in general and to digital mental health for psychiatric rehabilitation in particular. These papers illustrate that we are at the beginning of an era that may provide new knowledge and evidence-based tools to better promote mental health diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and recovery. (PsycINFO Database Record