ReviewAJOB neuroscience
Is There an App for That?: Ethical Issues in the Digital Mental Health Response to COVID-19.
Review in AJOB neuroscience. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Digital mental health needs a purpose-driven approach.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Digital Health Interventions for Military Members, Veterans, and Public Safety Personnel: Scoping Review.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2025Article
- Artificial Intelligence-Based Mobile Phone Apps for Child Mental Health: Comprehensive Review and Content Analysis.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2025Review
- Digital Health Resilience and Well-Being Interventions for Military Members, Veterans, and Public Safety Personnel: Environmental Scan and Quality Review.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2025Review
- Exploring the Ethical Challenges of Conversational AI in Mental Health Care: Scoping Review.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- Physician Perspectives on the Potential Benefits and Risks of Applying Artificial Intelligence in Psychiatric Medicine: Qualitative Study.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- The Acceptability of AI-Driven Resource Signposting to Young People Using a Mental Health Peer Support App.Digital society : ethics, socio-legal and governance of digital technology · 2025Article
- Reframing Mental Health Ethics.Community mental health journal · 2024Article
- Editorial: Digital mental health and wellbeing under crisis.Frontiers in digital health · 2024Article
- Geographic variations in driving time to US mental health care, digital access to technology, and household crowdedness.Health affairs scholar · 2023Article
- Data as symptom: Doctors' responses to patient-provided data in general practice.Social studies of science · 2023Article
- Effectiveness of chatbots on COVID vaccine confidence and acceptance in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore.NPJ digital medicine · 2023Article
- Mental health mobile application self-help for adolescents exhibiting psychological distress: A single case experimental design.Psychology and psychotherapy · 2023Article
- A Retrospective Longitudinal Analysis of Mental Health Admissions: Measuring the Fallout of the Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Review
- Editorial: Factors influencing user engagement with digital mental health interventions.Frontiers in digital health · 2023Article
- You Can't Have AI Both Ways: Balancing Health Data Privacy and Access Fairly.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Well before COVID-19, there was growing excitement about the potential of various digital technologies such as tele-health, smartphone apps, or AI chatbots to revolutionize mental healthcare. As the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread across the globe, clinicians warned of the mental illness epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic. Now, funding for digital mental health technologies is surging and many researchers are calling for widespread adoption to address the mental health sequelae of COVID-19. Reckoning with the ethical implications of these technologies is urgent because decisions made today will shape the future of mental health research and care for the foreseeable future. We contend that the most pressing ethical issues concern (1) the extent to which these technologies demonstrably improve mental health outcomes and (2) the likelihood that wide-scale adoption will exacerbate the existing health inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We argue that the evidence for efficacy is weak and that the likelihood of increasing inequalities is high. First, we review recent trends in digital mental health. Next, we turn to the clinical literature to show that many technologies proposed as a response to COVID-19 are unlikely to improve outcomes. Then, we argue that even evidence-based technologies run the risk of increasing health disparities. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers should not allocate limited resources to the development of many digital mental health tools and should focus instead on evidence-based solutions to address mental health inequalities.
Indexed as
Identifiers
33989127What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.