Mental Health Informatics [electronic resource] / edited by Margaret Lech, Insu Song, Peter Yellowlees, Joachim Diederich.

Mental Health Informatics: Current approaches -- The Rise of Person-Centered Healthcare and the Influence of Health Informatics and Social Network Applications on Mental Health Care -- The Changing Doctor-Patient Relationship – a Move to Anytime, Anywhere -- Novel Approaches to Clinical Care in Mental Health - from Asynchronous Telepsychiatry to Virtual Reality -- Speech Analysis for Mental Health Assessment using Support Vector Machines -- Social Networks and Automated Mental Health Screening -- Generating Explanations from Support Vector Machines for Psychological Classifications -- An Alternative Method of Analysis in the Absence of Control Group -- Stress and Emotion Recognition using Acoustic Speech Analysis.

This book introduces approaches that have the potential to transform the daily practice of psychiatrists and psychologists. This includes the asynchronous communication between mental health care providers and clients as well as the automation of assessment and therapy. Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilise speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers. The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication).