Studies Find Online Psychotherapy & Telepsychiatry Effective
Are telepsychiatry and virtual or online psychotherapy helpful?
Reviews of telepsychiatry studies, including a study published in the the World Journal of Psychiatry in 2016, have consistently found that telepsychiatry works. It leads to positive participant satisfaction, improved and reliable results, and can be a productive way to offer services that may even be more cost-effective than traditional face-to-face meetings. Telepsychiatry has been useful and effective in settings ranging from in-home video psychotherapy sessions to emergency department psychiatric consultations to nursing homes.
Telepsychiatry and virtual psychotherapy offer significant support to participants and provides benefits including:
better access to mental health care and providers
positive treatment results and participant satisfaction
less delay to getting care
greater efficiency with time for both participants and providers, increasing productivity of both
less need to take time off for work or childcare services to get to and attend appointments
less transportation delays and difficulties that may get in the way of making appointments
less stigma to receiving care
greater ability to access expert or specialized consultations and follow-up care that might not be available otherwise
In some states, medical licensure requirements for offering care have been temporarily modified during the pandemic (laws varies state-to-state), so people may also be able to seek help outside their city or state of residence, which is important especially for rural areas or states with less providers offering mental health care or specialized consultations. Some health care insurance plans may even be able to reimburse for sessions with clinicians that are out-of-state (every plan and state is different-- so I recommend contacting your individual insurance health plans to find out your coverage).
Some studies of telepsychiatry conducted before the pandemic found that clinicians have expressed concerns whether offering services remotely would reduce ability to establish rapport. But many psychotherapists are finding that psychotherapy and telepsychiatry have been very important and helpful ways to offer support, especially during a time when face-to-face meetings are not possible.
Furthermore, studies before the pandemic have shown that clinicians are often more concerned than patients are about the effectiveness of telepsychiatry-- and that people actually do find telepsychiatry helpful. In a study of school-based telepsychiatry, students felt very satisfied with and students, teachers, and clinicians felt it was efficient use of their time. In another study of telepsychiatry for depression, people felt more satisfied over time, as the number of video-based sessions increased. In a study of older veterans, 90 percent of them enjoyed video therapy-- preferring it even over in-person, despite the process being new to them.
As the pandemic continues to increase mental health care needs, video psychotherapy and telepsychiatry are helpful and highly effective solutions to expand access to care.
