Last month a client traveled to my office in Port Moody from a small Northern community in B.C. to receive treatment. I saw the client on 4 successive days. The distance between the two communities is roughly 700 miles. At the same time, I had been giving considerable thought to possibly moving to a more rural community myself. This would involve a long daily commute, but would eventually be my retirement nirvana. So where am I going with this you’re probably asking?
Both of these events have made me look closer at e-therapy . That someone should have to undergo the expense and inconvenience of traveling over 700 miles to receive appropriate treatment is outrageous. In a report last week, the World Health Organization was predicting that within 20 years more people will be affected by depression than any other health problem. The social and economic consequences of this will be enormous. e-therapy represents a new way of reaching people who otherwise can’t access treatments.
The Lancet last week reported on a study, which showed that real-time online cognitive-behaviour therapy was quite effective in treating patients with depression. And researchers at the University of New South Wales, have shown online treatments are just as effective as face-to-face therapies for a wide range of common mental disorders.
e-therapy certainly is not a perfect medium, it would be inappropriate to compare it to traditional face-to-face psychotherapy and assessment, but it does have the potential to significantly enhance the capacity of existing services. And it cannot be ignored that many people already seek out this kind of help online. Many professionals are threatened by new and emerging technologies, but the time has come to take a closer look at the most effective ways of integrating e-therapy into current practice.
