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

心理健康研究人员最近求助于网站和移动应用程序，为任何有互联网连接的人提供廉价的自动化认知行为疗法(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，这项研究对人类学研究生进行了实证、科学的数据收集和分析方法的培训，试图了解这种电子心理健康转向如何影响正常和异常低落情绪之间的流行区别。此外，它还探索了自动化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样一种方式传播，以帮助研究人员和政策制定者创新精神健康的治疗方式。该项目还通过国际学术合作建设基础科学的基础能力。Aaron Neiman将在斯坦福大学Duana Fullwiley博士的监督下，探索电子心理健康技术对抑郁症治疗方式的影响。该项目将调查这项电子心理健康研究中最著名的网站之一，询问它如何应对在线治疗抑郁症带来的许多技术和伦理挑战。利用实验室人种学方法，如访谈、嵌入观察和科学文献的文本分析，这项为期一年的研究地点是澳大利亚悉尼的黑狗研究所，这是一个开创这种新疗法的非营利性情绪障碍研究中心。在执行主任的领导下，该研究所近年来将自己从一个具有前瞻性的心理健康诊所改造成了一个开发新的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向，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阐明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。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.