The following article caught my attention a few days ago.
Treating mental illness over the Web
Don Butler
Canwest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, January 12, 2008
OTTAWA -- Sam Ozersky's voice still rings with incredulity when he talks about the American study that changed his thinking about treating patients with mood disorders.
The 1996 study compared two groups of 300 people being treated for depression by their family doctors.
Doctors with one group were given a short depression treatment program that included counselling to improve medication adherence and behavioural treatment to increase the use of coping strategies.
Doctors gave the other group the standard care they normally would prescribe. After seven months, 70 per cent of the group receiving the enhanced care had recovered, compared with just 20 per cent of those who got the usual care.
"This is unbelievable!" exclaims Ozersky, an expert in occupational psychiatry and senior consultant at the Toronto Hospital Mood Disorders Clinic. "In no field of medicine can you get that kind of variance."
The study convincingly demonstrated the benefits when patients and their family physicians -- who provide up to 90 per cent of mental health care -- are armed with and faithfully follow the best evidence-based treatments. The findings helped inspire Ozersky and other leading mental health experts to form Mensante Corp., and develop FeelingBetterNow.com, a Web site that diagnoses and recommends treatment of nine major mental disorders, from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder.
The site was launched in January 2006. After users fill out a detailed online survey, the FeelingBetterNow site determines whether they are at risk of a mental disorder. If the answer is yes, it generates a "care map" listing best-practice treatment options and a "follow-up map" that tracks patients' progress every three weeks. Family doctors use the maps to prescribe treatments.
Mensante's program is the first of its kind in the world, Ozersky said. Like the Canadarm, it has great potential for use beyond our borders.
"It's sort of like the robotic arm for getting your head straight," he says. It's also very much in sync with one of the major trends reshaping the health-care world today -- e-health.
In North America, 80 million people now belong to Web-based illness support groups. Statistics Canada says 35 per cent of Canadians 18 and over searched the Internet for medical or health-related information in 2005. Check Up from the Neck Up, an online mental health diagnostic site created by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario and several partners, had more than two million hits in six months. Last May, Forrester Research reported nearly one quarter of behavioural health patients use online services for their health problems. Of those, 62 per cent go online daily.
People with mental disorders spend more time online researching and using health sites than patients with other conditions. Internet giants Google and Microsoft are developing strategies to combine their online expertise with computerized personal health records. And North American drug manufacturers now spend $1 billion a year on targeted online advertising, a number that's expected to double by 2011.
Continue reading this long article here:
http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/story.html?id=4e82fa20-917c-4234-b7ec-77209ef10c32
The blog reported the Australian work in this area here:
http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-line-and-no-longer-alone-with-mental.html
It is really good to see how quite simple technologies can help ease the suffering and distress of those afflicted with a mental illness.
More power to the arms of all those working in the field.
David.
No comments:
Post a Comment