‘They thought they were doing good but it made people worse’: why mental health apps are under scrutiny

‘They thought they were doing good but it made people worse’: why mental health apps are under scrutiny (msn.com)

 

i think this programme is about the same company, i only watched the first few mins so not sure, but i remembered the name

Watch I Don't Trust My Therapist: UNTOLD | Stream free on Channel 4

 

Uh, is the therapy equivalent of "hey, psst, you, do drugs, we got some" not as cracked up as it was made to be? Without much concern for what drugs, for what usage, what dosage, or how it relates to the problem? If it even has anything to do with the problem? If they even understand the problem?

How weird. Since that works never.

They really thought they could just bring people in and help them without actually building the thing that helps people.

Are they prepared to accept that 95-99% of their stuff is not effective? Because 95-99% of their stuff is not effective and they will have to accept that if they start going about being rigorous. I don't think they are.

 

None of this was a surprise and I find it pathetic for anyone to claim the ‘only just now beginning to see..’

it was plainly obvious and the first thing I thought if when eg IAPT or NHS were talking about online - that people could be worried about writing down their private stuff and it being not said in a way that’s perfect representation and that someone can then keep the transcript or it not be secure. Or at worst that these things that are highly private could be used to blackmail or embarrass snc I don’t get how notes could be highly confidential and yet privacy or the ‘raw data’ isn’t even more guarded. It’s like which close friend would you text details of your intimate problem to and have that trail out there for it to be potentially shown to someone else. But even bigger.

I said out loud and anyone who claimed to be in the business/sector shouldn’t have been there if they didn’t also see and therefore guard against it, the obvious privacy barriers/data issue

given it was five, ten years ago a huge news thing was that there was a massive danger from online in general where kids were getting conned online to send pictures by people who then blackmailed them with them and so on and many ended up committing suicide (hence where it all came out): https://news.sky.com/story/deeply-d...icit-images-as-sextortion-cases-soar-12964273

it even has a name for it as a crime

plus if you had forums of any kind even back in the noughties you had to think around these things. Of privacy and managing data and so on and have policies equivalent to vulnerabilities of user and that were upfront and so on. So I don’t understand how on Earth an area like this just let people wander into it as if they ‘just switch to using video and it’s fine’ without all of at least what every other subject would think of.

And anyone who has been in a workplace knows you have to be careful about what you sling in written format like email

so I don’t get how anyone dares with these excuses.

none of these things are the ‘added bits you don’t see coming until you’ve tried it fir a few years’ part. They are the ‘it’s obvious regs need to be in place for anyone to be able to enter the business’ part. The basics that you see IF you can honour to the level needed BEFORE anyone gives the go-ahead of the new medium of operation.

it’s just weird - but not surprising to me anymore - how this most vulnerable area can be the WORST of any area even vs those with no foreseen vulnerabilities in users

it’s that callous indifference agsin if you have a sector run by people who’ve ba****ised the subject into one of rewriting reality and doing the opposite with ‘trauma’ than it should (yes, it’s labels the victims - and I think that’s if the ‘what could you do to not cause it’ smell) vs using the term ‘injured’ then ‘it’s the reaction that was the problem’- youve an attitude of people who can’t even see responsibility nevermind be responsible running the show. I mention this because the ‘perspective’ leaks into being obvious when you see the sentiments they push in their treatment literature of how they ‘see these people and phenomena’

I don’t know how it ended up here so bad but I’m glad the MRHRA has found a way to step in - a bit like it needs to jag in on the ME stuff (where it can find the odd bit under its jurisdiction that it can at least sort, which wouldn’t be there as an issue if eg behavioural assessed their own harms properly) because the overseers of ‘behavioural’ aren’t going to be responsible themselves so the load is huge on the periphery bits where eg someone might get dragged in because it’s tech or uses their facilities or does communication that might come under spam or GDPR.

but it’s scary how they aren’t calling out ‘why the heck isn’t this sector as s whole doing this anyway and properly oversighted?’

 

Yep this confirms the sector has returned to the days of ‘playing at doing it’ and then working on the facade of ‘looking like a science’ instead of - when it was being pushed to be more scientific and check these things in the 90s - actually doing it

so the BPS made a career, just when scientific psychology were noting proper checks that therapy worked and diagnosed being specific with matched treatments that were developed based on proper science, it seems in the ‘how to blag seeming like you (they are the same old Freudian psychoanalytic tradition charading behind having warped ‘CBT’ to their own means) are medicine or a science’.

it’s just such a waste and such a horrific abuse of trust of a society to have decided that just when people demand it’s time you checked what you do doesn’t harm and start driving your subject forward you instead hear this as ‘how do we play that system to seem like we do this’ as an attitude. But I guess that dodgy outfit of people had the speed and propaganda to sell their wares to unsuspecting purse string holders and then knew proliferation to remove those who might critique from any power was the next strategy.

so how can they really regulate externals to do any different when you don’t want the regs for yourselves other than saying ‘we are the only ones who can do this’? It’s a tricky conundrum.

anyway

whenever I see things like this - charades to public of what should be there (making it damn clear those who set it up know exactly what they should be doing as that’s what their are facad-ing), I think of the term ActionFraud.

in the UK we had something called ActionFraud which about 4 years ago (?) journos found out was just a front pretending to be the UK place where all fraud was being tracked (online scams and telephone etc ) and solved - you know like a centralised approach these things needed when those behind them could be eg abroad and ringing people anywhere.

except it wasn’t they found out all they’d funded was the people taking calls when people reported it. So it ‘looked like’ we had a fraud dept.

this is the one that was the expose (which describes how victims were mocked) but is paywalled: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...ocked-as-police-fail-to-investigate-wlh8c6rs6

https://www.which.co.uk/news/articl...by-police-fraud-reporting-system-avxU06T4Hclz

https://www.standard.co.uk/business...poor-funding-of-financial-crime-a4213946.html

https://academic.oup.com/policing/article/15/3/1758/6273115


And the appeared to have done this facade well enough no one thought to look under the hood. The irony of its topics matter of course


because no one even thought of it - not in this area- being something that would be like this. Until someone nailed the expose and it’s was truly an article full of emperors sitting around in their underpants - who would have thought that was the state of the fraud dept, I don’t know if it was a whistleblower or what but sometimes things are so ridiculous they slide under the credulity radar.

I wonder where they got their ideas from?