Digital Mental Health: A Way Forward for Public Mental Health

Abstract

Digital technology has an important role in health care, including mental health. This has the potential to achieve what contemporary mental health could not achieve in public mental health. The phenomenology of psychiatric disorders, psychiatric signs, and symptoms has got digital coloring and manifestations of psychological phenomena, which has led to the need for the categorization of new disorders as social media-related disorders. Technology has also provided new ways of fulfilling basic physiological needs in recent years ranging from feeling safe with gadgets to technological self-actualization. Digital phenotyping could aid in the early detection of illness and relapse and has technology for early intervention. Soon, ChatGPT will be used to create psychiatric history and assessments of patients and artificial intelligence and machine learning to diagnose and predict the prognosis of psychiatric disorders and rehabilitation. Social media is the new social support, and it can act as a platform for mass communication. The effectiveness of internet-based therapies compared to face-to-face therapies has to be closely examined. This article gives a futuristic bird’s-eye view of recent developments in digital mental health, its impact on phenomenology and the evolution of new psychiatric disorders, and its usefulness in mental health service delivery.