International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience
Open Access

Abstract

Anxiety Online was a very successful online platform, created with assistance from the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. This platform was designed to diagnose twenty-one mental health disorders and to provide online treatment for five anxiety disorders. In addition this platform has provided a database consisting of very valuable mental health data. This database has been used to validate several of the mental health diagnoses provided by the platform, to investigate the factors associated with attrition and to study the comorbidity patterns found in this online sample. More recently this database has been used to build a model to predict the risk of suicide ideation. This model is currently being incorporated in an application specifically designed for the use of General Practitioners. In this address we describe some of the advantages of an online database of this nature, such as its ability to reach patients who do not seek other forms of mental health assistance. In addition we dwell on some of the disadvantages of such a database, such as the low rate of post-treatment assessment and biases in the sample in terms of age, gender and computer literacy.

Biography

Denny Meyer completed a DBL from the University of South Africa. She is an Associate Professor of Statistics at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne Australia. She has published more than 100 papers in reputable journals and has received funding on four external grants in recent years.

Email: dmeyer@swin.edu.au