The Digital Therapeutic Alliance and Human-Computer Interaction

Course overview

This course is based upon material published in JIMR Mental Health and is available as an open-access article. The therapeutic alliance (TA), the relationship that develops between a therapist and a client-patient, is a critical factor in the outcome of psychological therapy. As mental health care is increasingly adopting digital technologies and offering therapeutic interventions that may not involve human therapists, the notion of a TA in digital mental health care requires exploration. To date, there has been some incipient work on developing measures to assess the conceptualization of a digital TA for mental health apps. However, the few measures that have been proposed have more or less been derivatives of measures from psychology used to assess the TA in traditional face-to-face therapy. This conceptual paper explores one such instrument that has been proposed in the literature, the Mobile Agnew Relationship Measure, and examines it through human-computer interaction (HCI) lens. Through this process, we show how theories from HCI can play a role in shaping or generating a more suitable, purpose-built measure of the digital therapeutic alliance (DTA), and we contribute suggestions on how HCI methods and knowledge can be used to foster the DTA in mental health apps. This course on the therapeutic alliance in digital mental healthcare is designed for social workers, professional counselors, psychologists, nurses, and substance abuse counselors, who do clinical work. This course is appropriate for intermediate and advanced level practitioners who wish to increase their knowledge about the therapeutic alliance in a digital context. It may also be useful for licensed clinicians who require clinical continuing education courses for license renewal. Authors: DAlfonso, Lederman, Bucci, and Berry Learning Objectives: This course will provide the practitioner with detailed information regarding the digital therapeutic alliance. Specifically, a professional will: Distinguish applications of the human-computer interaction (HCI) Describe the elements of Self-Determination Theory Summarize the assessment of mARM items in light of HCI Citation: DAlfonso, S., Lederman, R., Bucci, S., and Berry, K. (2020). The Digital Therapeutic Alliance and Human-Computer Interaction. JMIR Mental Health 7(12): e2189