Bizarre: You Can Now See A Therapist Over Your iPhone

Business Insider ^ | Sep. 14, 2010 | Josh Dzieza

[nickcarraway]

Attention, smartphone addicts: Now you can get treatment for that addiction through the very device that enslaves you. Josh Dzieza on psychology’s new technological frontier.

Plenty of people joke about their addictions to their “CrackBerries,” and there’s likely more than a bit of truth to that. (Indeed, the new DSM, the mental health bible for psychologists, may include “Internet addiction” among its many pathologies.)

But while smartphones can certainly enable compulsive behavior, surprisingly psychologists are increasingly seeing them as a tool with potential mental health benefits.

Capitalizing on the ubiquity of the increasingly powerful mobile devices nearly everyone carries around nearly all the time, clinicians, researchers, and software developers are designing cellphone apps to give patients psychological help on the fly. Marientina Gotsis, media lab manager at USC, started thinking about designing apps with therapeutic potential when she realized that her phone had joined her wallet and keys on the small list of things she never left home without. “It’s what keeps people connected, functional, feeling safe and entertained. So why not use what people hold on to close to deliver behavioral interventions?”

It’s the kind of innovation that Kathleen Carroll, a psychology professor at Yale, says may be a “small revolution” in mental health care. These apps are part of the “brain fitness” industry, a category that includes computerized memory exercises and cognitive-impairment assessment programs, and that SharpBrains, a company that analyzes the industry, estimates to have grown 35 percent in 2009, to $295 million.

[jessduntno]

Q. What do you call a Dr. who flunks out of medical school?
A. A psychiatrist.

[MIchaelTArchangel]

Why would anyone want to see the rapist on an iPhone?

[SunkenCiv]

Unfortunately, the people who need therapy the worst are Apple-bashers. Thanks nick.