Throughout my life I have met a lot of people with depression, from my uncle, to my best friend in Chile and my best friend in the US. I always considered depression and its treatment to be a purely human one and medicinal one, from therapy to medication to more extreme measures. My psychology class seem to agree with that, however once I started doing my research project for the class, I found out of something very interesting. There are now online resources available for people with depression.
The research I read looked at people with depression and certain anxiety-related comorbidities (which are conditions that you have simultaneously) to see if the usage of an online resource called “Deprexis” influenced the treatment of depression. They found that people with social phobia comorbidity benefited the most from using Deprexis. However, the results were incomplete and did not give much for the future except for a “more research needs to be done”. So why am I writing a blog about it? Because the fact that this website exists, and that research is being done with it shows the increasing effect of technology on the field of psychology.
The techno pessimism we have seen in class of “technology will disconnect us” might come true in the area of depression treatment, if this websites prove to be more helpful to people than going to therapy then the jobs will change from face-to-face to manly over the internet. I personally do not believe it will to that since different people need different types of help, including face-to-face and physical contact, and that cannot be done through a computer (at least not yet, time will tell if we can ever get touch sensors on computers). Instead I believe technology like this might create a change for the better, allowing those who can not get to therapy appointments because of specific situations to have a different way of getting help.
Source: Probst, T., Berger, T., Meyer, B., Späth, C., Schröder, J., Hohagen, F., … Klein, J. P. (2019). Social phobia moderates the outcome in the EVIDENT study: A randomized controlled trial on an Internet-based psychological intervention for mild to moderate depressive symptoms. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1037/ccp0000441