Social Media and E-mental Health

Abstract

Mental health services worldwide are only able to serve a minority of patients. Expert advice is in most cases not accessible even in developed countries with a functioning mental health care system. Threshold to care are high and the time between first critical developments and symptoms and first professional interventions is long, sometimes several years.

The evolving communication tools through social media and web-based services may provide new and exciting opportunities to change that. Especially young people have a different approach to interact, learn and access services through the Internet. The momentum there is as crucial as it is in education. Our mental health care system in all its components will most likely very different than today. E mental health will be an integrated component contributing to more capacity, higher quality of care and better accessibility.

What is the key in developing new tools and what can today's clinicians and researchers do to be an active partner in this process? What are the major concerns and how should we address them also as professional organization? This may be an opportunity of a lifetime for a paradigm shift. Its success relates to good integration and implementation of these exciting tools to create a new continuum of tools addressing a continuum of needs.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.