Digital treatments for affective disorders: an integrated overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews digital treatments for mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder, highlighting their potential to improve care.

Contribution

The paper provides an integrated overview of digital tools and their applications in treating affective disorders.

Findings

Digital treatments show promise in addressing unmet needs in affective disorder care.

Telepsychiatry and AI-based tools are being tested in clinical settings for mood disorders.

Serious gaming and virtual reality are emerging as supportive treatment approaches.

Abstract

Affective disorders represent a category of psychiatric syndromes with high prevalence and associated disability. While effective, both pharmacological and psychosocial, treatments are available for depression and bipolar disorder, the many therapeutic needs of affected patients are far from being properly addressed under routine conditions. Along the past decade, several digital treatments, tools and approaches have been developed and tested in clinical settings, showing an highly promising potential to fill the treatment gap of affective psychopathology. In more detail, reviewed here will be telepsychiatry solutions for affective disorders, also encompassing the available officially approved digital therapies for major depression and bipolar disorder. Furthermore, the impact of artificial intelligence, serious gaming, social media and virtual/augmented reality in the treatment of mood disorders will be also discussed, in the light of the most recent research evidence on these topics.

None Declared