Last month I attended the 7th World Congress for CBT in Lima, Peru. Conferences are a great way to get up to speed on the latest developments in a field, and this conference was no exception. Overall, the presentations made me very optimistic about the future of online therapy. There is a lot of exciting and encouraging research being conducted.

As part of a symposium on internet-based treatment, I presented some of the latest results from AI-Therapy’s Overcome Social Anxiety program:

Fjola presenting at the CBT world congress — Dr Fjola Helgadottir presenting AI-Therapy overcoming social anxiety at the CBT World Congress 2013

Investigation into real world treatment data

My presentation was somewhat unusual for an academic conference in that it was based on real world data. Typically, talks are based on carefully controlled trials. There is an important reason for this – one goal of a trial is to make the results reproducible by other researchers. This is a key aspect of scientific research. However, there is an important question that is often ignored: will the results translate into the real world? The real world is chaotic, users are not screened, users are not monitored, there is less control over the equipment used, etc. In the past it has been found that treatments that work well in a laboratory environment cease to have the same impact when they are released to the general population. One goal of my talk was to present data from a commercially available treatment program, and contrast this with the latest results from academic systems.

Visitors to the AI-Therapy website

Before continuing, I should mention that all AI-Therapy users are anonymous, and their results are kept strictly confidential. The only data I presented are aggregated, showing average scores across groups of users.

As can be seen in the slide above, we have had almost 20,000 unique visitors to the website since our launch about a year ago. The top 5 countries for visitors are:

USA
UK
Iceland
Australia
Canada

These results are roughly what I would expect. The US is our largest market, but a significant margin. The reason Iceland has made the top 3 is due to some media coverage we have received there.

Effective social anxiety treatment

In order to assess the efficacy of the Overcome Social Anxiety program, I determined its pre-post effect size. When using the program, users fill out a series of questionnaires before starting, and the same questionnaires after completion. The effect size is a standardized measures of the reduction in symptoms over this period (see this page for information about effect sizes, and effect size calculators).

The effect size for the first 19 people who completed all sections of the program was 1.7. An effect size of 0.2 is considered small, an effect size of 0.5 is considered medium, and effect size of 0.8 is considered large. Therefore, an effect size of 1.7 is very large. (It is important to note that this value has been calculated based on people who completed the whole program, and does not include people who started the program, but did not reach the end. We intend to write up a more detailed analysis, and release it as a white paper on this site. Please watch this space.) The primary conclusion is that online treatment programs for social anxiety can be an effective treatment strategy for real world patients.

I am already looking forward to the 8th CBT World Congress, which will be held in Melbourne Australia in 2016. I look forward to seeing the advances that will be made in the online therapy field over the next three years!

Fjola Helgadottir, PhD, MClinPsych, is a clinical psychologist, a senior research clinician at the University of Oxford, and is a co-creator of AI-Therapy.com, an online CBT treatment program for overcoming social anxiety

A recent study says “yes”!

Online therapy is an active and growing area of research in clinical psychology. In fact, there was a symposium devoted to the subject at the recent World Congress of CBT in Lima, Peru (which I was honoured to be a part of – to be covered in a future blog). Perhaps the most important question that researchers are trying to answer is: “Does online work as well as face to face therapy?”

This is a difficult question to answer since there are so many hidden variables. In fact, there is no universal answer, since it depends on the particular online system being examined, and the skill level of the therapists involved in the study. A better questions is “Can online therapy work as well as face to face therapy?” In other words, are there any online systems that can match the results of live therapists for a specific problem? According to a recent publication, the answer is “yes”!

A team of researchers from the University of Zurich published the following paper:

Birgit Wagner, Andrea B. Horn, Andreas Maercker. Internet-based versus face-to-face cognitive-behavioral intervention for depression: A randomized controlled non-inferiority trial. Journal of Affective Disorders. July 23, 2013. (see this link for more information)

The authors conducted a study involving 62 people with moderate depression. Half of the patients were treated using traditional CBT in-person techniques, and the other half were treated online. The authors found that at a three month follow up, the patients who were treated online had fewer symptoms of depression than the control group. In other words, the online treatment program actually performed better than the face to face therapy.

Advantages of online therapy

I have discussed some of the advantages of online therapy on this blog and in my publications. These include:

Clients can progress at their own pace
Clients have a complete record of their treatment, which they can revisit at any time
“Therapist drift” is a known phenomenon, where therapists move away from the best practices of a particular treatment over time. With online treatments, it is easier to enforce a consistent treatment, with the correct “dose” of clinical content delivered during each session.

Of course, online therapies have challenges of their own. In particular, it is more difficult to adapt the treatment towards the individual symptoms and needs of the users without therapist involvement. In fact, it is this problem of individual personalization that AI-Therapy’s social anxiety program attempts to address.

More studies are needed to fully investigate the strengths and weaknesses of online therapy. However, the study above adds to a growing body of evidence that online therapy has tremendous potential, and will play an important role in the future of mental health treatment.

The AI-Therapy Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2013