Peter Yellowlees - Böcker

A practical guide for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals seeking to exploit the enormous potential of today's innovative digital technologies to improve the quality, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness of care for patients with psychiatric disorders.

The book examines how the related disorders of burnout, anxiety, depression, and addiction, can lead to suicide and explores the influence of gender, culture, aging, and personal resilience on outcomes. In addition, it investigates ways to mitigate the impact of these factors to improve physician health and well-being.

Fictional, but thorough and realistic, case studies are at the heart of this book. One per chapter, they allow readers to get inside the minds of physicians and understand their lives and stressors, from long hours and staff shortages to onerous administrative demands.

This book introduces approaches that have the potential to transform the daily practice of psychiatrists and psychologists. This includes the asynchronous communication between mental health care providers and clients as well as the automation of assessment and therapy. Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers. The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication). Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers. The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication).