TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
explains in Time to Heal, people can have the notion that a mental illness is a loss of face for the family, a result of bad karma, or the individual’s fate and result of bad deeds in past lives. This stigma
have a high Internet presence and/or use the Internet for contact, actions and news.
treatment, and efforts of family members to ignore or conceal the mental health problems of their family member. Often patients are still locked up or chained out of sight and the conditions in many mental hospitals are appalling and treatments abusive. Good examples of mental health stigma fighters with a extensive social media appearance are Time to Change in the UK, Mind Freedom in the US and Sane in Australia.
According to the 2007 Lancet series, training facilities are generally inadequate and on top of that there is a large scale migration of mental health professionals to higher income countries, the so called brain-drain. On top of that, in the community based mental health care models, the specialists will have more roles then merely treating patients and they need additional skills. There are already short courses addressing this leadership in mental health and universities have been launching academic courses in public health, mental health, research and human rights. A few of them are for most part based on elearning.
and lack of knowledge about mental disorders can result in a strong avoidance in seeking
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Empowerment and independence of users and caregivers
People with mental health problems, including their caretakers, will benefit from more information about conditions and treatment, more ownership, more possible choices, decisions and support. Nowadays there is 24/7 access to online information, suicide-prevention and emergency sites/telephone numbers like Befrienders Worldwide. There are apps on mobile devices like the T2 MoodTracker application of the US army, Mobile Therapy, a cell phone application for 'emotional self-awareness'. And there are Internet services like Personal Health Records (PHR’s) such as Google Health. With these applications people can manage a part of their mental health care themselves, wherever they are or at what time of the day. Examples of user and self-help groups are Alcohol Anonymous, the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and online communities like Intervoice. A lot of these group
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Capacity building in the mental health care
So, development of more, cheap and easy applicable distant- and elearning programs seem a ultimate solution here. Practitioners and students from low and middle income countries don’t need to leave their country or area for years, which is very expensive and bears the risk of not coming back. They can practice on the spot and even in the remote underserved rural places, in their own pace and time.
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Global knowledge: together we know more
International conferences, including the travelling and accommodations, are not affordable for most practitioners in low and middle income countries. The same with paper text books and journals. The new technologies can tackle most of this money related obstacles and give ample possibilities