Analysis of E-mental Health Research: Mapping the Relationship between Information Technology and Mental Healthcare

Abstract

Abstract Background: E-mentalhealthcare is the convergence of digital technologies with mental health services. It has beendevelopedto fill a gap in healthcare for people who need mental wellbeing support and may never otherwise receive psychological treatment.This study aimed to apply text mining techniques to analyze the huge data of e-mental health researches and to report on research clusters and trends as well as the co-occurrence of biomedical and the use of information technology in this field.Methods: The e-mentalhealth research data was obtainedfrom 3,663 bibliographicrecords from Web of Science (WoS)and 3,172 full-text articlesfrom PubMed Central (PMC). The text mining techniques utilized for this study includedbibliometric analysis, information extraction, and visualization.Results: The e-mental health research topic trendsprimarily involvede-health care services and medical informatics research. The clusters of research comprise 16 clusters, which refer to mental sickness, ehealth, diseases, IT, and self-management. Based onthe information extraction analysis, in the biomedical domain, a “depression” entity was frequently detected and it pairs with other entities in the network with a betweenness centrality weighted at 0.046869 (eg. depression-online, depression-diabetes, depression-measure, and depression-mobile).The IT entity-relations of “mobile” were the most frequently found(weighted at 0.043466). The top pairs are related to depression, mobile health, and text message.Conclusions: E-mental health research trends focused on disease related-depression and using IT for treatment and prevention, primarily via online and mobile devices. Producing AI and machine learning are also being studied for e-mental healthcare. The results illustrate that physical sickness is likely to cause a mental health problem and identify the IT that was applied to help manage and mitigate mental health impacts.