Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy
Open Access

Short Communication

The Feasibility of eHealth in Mental Health Care

¹National Institute for Health and Welfare, Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, Helsinki, Finland

²Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Philosophy, University of Turku, Finland

³Department of Food and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

Corresponding Author:

Syaron Basnet
National Institute for Health and Welfare
Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services
Helsinki Finland, P.O. Box 30
FI-00271 Helsinki, Finland
Tel: +358443223660
E-mail: syaronbasnet@gmail.com

Received date: October 15, 2014; Accepted date: December 15, 2014; Published date: December 20, 2014

Citation: Basnet S, Tamminen M, Lahti T (2014) The Feasibility of eHealth in Mental Health Care. J Addict Res Ther 5:205. doi:10.4172/2155-6105.1000205

Copyright: © 2014 Basnet S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Currently, eHealth is widely used in mental health care. Most eHealth services have been developed for mental health care due to its distinctive features such as privacy, accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and cost-efficiency. This review summarizes existing literature on the feasibility of eHealth in mental health care and discusses its pros and cons as a service delivery tool. To conduct a systematic literature search, over 11000 articles were retrieved from PubMed and Medline. The keywords used in eHealth studies are diverse: according to the two databases, eHealth and mHealth are the most common ones. To date, a variety of eHealth applications have been developed for obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias and other common mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. Both short and long-term positive outcomes have been reported when using these applications. eHealth has potential to overcome the fear of shame, guilt, and stigma, which are common concerns of mental health patients. However, licensing, ethical standards and guidelines for eHealth applications in mental health care is urgently needed as currently the rapid proliferation and commercialization of unproven electronic materials reduce the liability of eHealth services.

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