Digital mental health technologies: useful, usable, and safe?

ales-nesetril-Im7lZjxeLhg-unsplash

Cara Richardson and Stephanie Allan summarise a recent paper focusing on the growing field of digital psychiatry and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality.

[read the full story...]

Meditation and mindfulness can help us and harm us, but how common are adverse events?

Featured

Edel McGlanaghy critiques a systematic review which finds that meditation may lead to adverse events, particularly psychiatric adverse events.

[read the full story...]

Adverse effects of psychotherapy for depression: new meta-analysis looks at deterioration rates

riccardo-mion-584741-unsplash

Edel Mc Glanaghy reacquaints us with the negative effects of psychotherapies for adult depression, through an impressive new meta-analysis of trials that measure deterioration rates in patients receiving psychotherapy compared with controls.

[read the full story...]

The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on psychological treatments #SeeingFurther

Walking Sideways AFCXWbCGo (1)

Ioana Cristea highlights some of the key ideas from the recently published Lancet Psychiatry Commission on psychological treatments research in tomorrow’s science. She also raises a number of objections to the 50-page report, which we hope will generate some much needed discussion on this topic.

Look out for our #SeeingFurther podcast with the authors of the Commission and a Twitter chat at 12:30pm GMT on Monday 19th March.

[read the full story...]

Negative Effects Questionnaire: measuring the potential harm of psychotherapy

Counselling and Support

Edel McGlanaghy publishes her debut blog on the Negative Effects Questionnaire for monitoring and reporting adverse effects of psychotherapy. She also highlights her own APT study (Adverse effects of Psychological Therapy), which is currently recruiting individuals with experience of any face to face psychological therapy.

[read the full story...]

The harms of psychotherapy: are BME and LGBT communities more at risk?

532076662_e80dbd8ec1_o

Keith Laws and Samei Huda mull over a recent national survey looking at patients experiences of the harms of psychotherapy. The study reports that both black and minority ethnic people and lesbian, gay and bisexual people reported higher rates of long-lasting negative effects of psychotherapy.

[read the full story...]

Psychotherapy trials should report the side effects of treatment

shutterstock_178351865

If a treatment is powerful enough to have a good effect, then it’s powerful enough to have a bad effect. This is well recognised when it comes to medication, with strict regulations in place to ensure adverse outcomes are monitored and measured. By contrast, psychotherapy has never been as readily associated with the potential to [read the full story…]