Mobile mental health: a smartphone CBT program for busy clinicians

Abstract

Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) has been shown to be as effective as pharmacotherapy for depression. However, we do not have enough skilled clinicians to provide CBT to many patients with depression; even when the clinician has the required skills, he/she will not have sufficient time to administer the therapy to his/her many of his/her patients with depression. We have therefore decided to develop a smartphone CBT application which would help the clinicians in making CBT accessible to as many patients as possible. We plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial to test the application this year.