Doctoral Dissertation Research: Automated Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the Treatment of Depression

心理健康研究人员最近转向网站和移动应用程序，向任何能上网的人提供廉价、自动化的认知行为疗法（CBT），这是一种抑郁症治疗方法，通常由训练有素的心理健康专业人员亲自实施。通过研究这些治疗方法的开发、营销和测试所涉及的社会实践，本研究旨在培养一名人类学研究生的经验、科学数据收集和分析方法，试图了解这种电子心理健康转向如何影响正常和异常情绪低落之间的普遍区别。此外，它还探讨了自动化CBT在产生新型心理健康知识方面的影响，以及治疗师和患者之间的关系。这项研究的结果将以这种方式传播，以帮助研究人员和决策者创新精神卫生治疗方式。该项目还通过国际学术合作建设基础科学的基础设施能力。在斯坦福大学Duana Fullwiley博士的指导下，Aaron Neiman将探索电子心理健康技术对抑郁症治疗方式的影响。该项目将调查电子心理健康研究中最突出的网站之一，询问它如何应对在线抑郁症治疗带来的许多技术和伦理挑战。这项为期一年的研究是在澳大利亚悉尼的黑狗研究所进行的，该研究所采用了访谈、嵌入式观察和科学文献文本分析等实验室人种学方法。黑狗研究所是一家非营利性情绪障碍研究中心，开创了这种新形式的治疗。在其执行董事的领导下，该研究所近年来已经从一个具有前瞻性的精神健康诊所转变为一个开发新型抑郁症治疗方法的世界级研究机构。这反映了全球心理健康研究的更广泛的数字化转变，主要由澳大利亚政府领导。在这项研究中收集的人种学数据将揭示自动化治疗的可能未来，以及这些新的人机交互如何改变人们对抑郁症构成的普遍理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Mental health researchers have recently turned to websites and mobile applications to deliver inexpensive, automated cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a depression treatment usually administered in-person by a trained mental health professional, to anyone with an Internet connection. By studying the social practices involved in the development, marketing, and testing of these treatments, this research, which trains a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, seeks to understand how this e-mental health turn influences popular distinctions between normal and abnormal low mood. In addition, it explores what impact automated CBT has in producing new kinds of mental health knowledge, and the relationship between therapist and patient. The findings of this research will be disseminated in such a way to aid researchers and policy-makers to innovate treatment modalities for mental health. The project also builds infrastructural capacity in basic science through international scholarly cooperation.Aaron Neiman, under the supervision of Dr. Duana Fullwiley of Stanford University, will explore the impact e-mental health technology on depression treatment modalities. The project will investigate one of the most prominent sites of this e-mental health research, asking how it navigates the many technical and ethical challenges raised by taking depression treatment online. Employing laboratory ethnographic methods such as interviews, embedded observation, and textual analysis of scientific documents, the site of this year-long research is the Black Dog Institute in Sydney, Australia, a nonprofit mood disorder research center pioneering this new form of therapy. Under the leadership of its executive director, the Institute has refashioned itself in recent years from a forward-thinking mental health clinic into a world-class research institute developing novel depression treatments. This reflects a broader digital turn in mental health research globally, largely led by the Australian government. The ethnographic data gathered in this study will shed light on a possible future of automated therapy, and how these new human-computer interactions change popular understandings of what constitutes depression.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.