The Efficacy of Telepsychiatry in Addiction Patients: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Psychiatry is one of the many medical subspecialties that have benefited from the advent of telemedicine. Substance abuse treatment via telepsychiatry expeditiously increased with the start of the pandemic and has brought changes to its rules and regulations. In this study, we focused on the prognosis of substance abuse patients treated with telepsychiatry, the various changes that occurred during the pandemic, and the difficulties faced by clinicians using telepsychiatry. PubMed and Google Scholar were searched for relevant articles between January 2010 and July 2022 using both broad and narrow keywords in addition to the MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) approach. The total number of records found was 765. Strict criteria for inclusion and exclusion ensured that only relevant information was collected. After removing duplicates, irrelevant studies, and research that did not meet the inclusion criteria, we were left with 373 studies from both electronic databases. From those, we ultimately retrieved 35 studies, which were subjected to a thorough content search and quality evaluation with the help of specialized instruments, and a total of 19 papers were included in our systematic review. We concluded that telepsychiatry use for substance abuse patients increased during the pandemic, and the prognosis of these patients treated with telepsychiatry was similar to that of in-person treatment. However, a combination of telepsychiatry with in-person sessions showed much better results.

Keywords: addiction psychiatry; addiction therapy; substance addiction; substance use disorder (sud); tele psychiatry; tele-health.

Figure 1. Flowchart with the description of sorting process for paper selection