Ethical Issues for Direct-to-Consumer Digital Psychotherapy Apps: Addressing Accountability, Data Protection, and Consent

Course overview

This course is based upon material published in JMIR Mental Health and is available as an open-access article. This paper focuses on the ethical challenges presented by direct-to-consumer (DTC) digital psychotherapy services that do not involve oversight by a professional mental health provider. DTC digital psychotherapy services can potentially assist in improving access to mental health care for the many people who would otherwise not have the resources or ability to connect with a therapist. However, the lack of adequate regulation in this area exacerbates concerns over how safety, privacy, accountability, and other ethical obligations to protect an individual in therapy are addressed within these services. In the traditional therapeutic relationship, there are ethical obligations that serve to protect the interests of the client and provide warnings. In contrast, in a DTC therapy app, there are no clear lines of accountability or associated ethical obligations to protect the user seeking mental health services. The types of DTC services that present ethical challenges include apps that use a digital platform to connect users to minimally trained nonprofessional counselors, as well as services that provide counseling steered by artificial intelligence and conversational agents. There is a need for adequate oversight of DTC nonprofessional psychotherapy services and additional empirical research to inform policy that will provide protection to the consumer. This course on direct-to-consumer digital psychotherapy apps is designed for social workers, professional counselors, psychologists, nurses, and substance abuse counselors, who do clinical work. This course is appropriate for beginning, intermediate and advanced level practitioners who wish to develop or increase their knowledge of ethics related to nonprofessional DTC psychotherapy services may also be useful for licensed clinicians who require clinical continuing education courses for license renewal. Authors: Martinez-Martin and Kreitmair Learning Objectives: This course will provide the practitioner with detailed information regarding the ethics of digital psychotherapy applications. Specifically, a professional will: Identify data protection concerns in non-professional direct-to-consumer psychotherapy services Recognize the ethical implications of accountability in direct-to-consumer digital psychotherapy apps Distinguish issues of consent related to direct-to-consumer digital services for psychotherapy Citation: Martinez-Martin, N. Kreitmair, K. (2018). Ethical Issues for Direct-to-Consumer Digital Psychotherapy Apps: Addressing Accountability, Data Protection, and Consent. JMIR Mental Health 5(2):e32.