Promoting mobile health

Towards Digital Mental Health? Entwining Expectations, Novelty, and Value - A Research Agenda in Biomedicine and Society - NCBI Bookshelf An official website of the United States government Here's how you know The .gov means it's official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site. The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely. Log in Show account info Close Account Logged in as: username Dashboard Publications Account settings Log out Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation Bookshelf Search database Books All Databases Assembly Biocollections BioProject BioSample Books ClinVar Conserved Domains dbVar Gene Genome GEO DataSets GEO Profiles GTR Identical Protein Groups MedGen MeSH NLM Catalog Nucleotide OMIM PMC Protein Protein Clusters Protein Family Models PubChem BioAssay PubChem Compound PubChem Substance PubMed SNP SRA Structure Taxonomy ToolKit ToolKitAll ToolKitBookgh Search term Search Browse Titles Advanced Help Disclaimer NCBI Bookshelf. A service of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Faulkner A, editor. A Research Agenda in Biomedicine and Society. Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar Publishing; 2026. This chapter is an author manuscript version first made accessible on the NCBI Bookshelf website March 9, 2026. This chapter is an author manuscript version first made accessible on the NCBI Bookshelf website March 9, 2026. A Research Agenda in Biomedicine and Society. Show details Faulkner A, editor. Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar Publishing ; 2026. Contents Search term Towards Digital Mental Health? Entwining Expectations, Novelty, and Value Martyn Pickersgill and Jorge Crespo Suarez . Author Information and Affiliations Authors Martyn Pickersgill and Jorge Crespo Suarez . Affiliations 1 Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, The University of Edinburgh Abstract Digital artefacts and infrastructures have been presented as ever more urgent and necessary for mental health research and practice. Among other endeavours within the evolving and multifaceted field of digital health, telemedicine and mobile health have formed particular foci of promissory, expectational discourse regarding the improvement of epistemic and clinical work in psychiatry (and mental health more generally). These discourses rehearse, and perhaps even contribute to reorganising, multivalent ontologies of distress that interpolate varied notions of the neurobiological, the psychological, and the social. In this chapter, we contextualise and historicise some of these developments, attending to the enactment of the multimodal field of ‘digital mental health’. Entwined within the deployment of expectational discourses are particular framings of the novelty of digital mental health interventions and their implications, and the configuration of professional and indeed economic values. Introduction 1 Within psychiatry and psychology, digital artefacts and infrastructures have been presented as imperative. These are very varied, and include text messaging, websites, blogs, social media, and chatbots ( Mohr et al., 2017 ; Torous et al., 2021 ). Therapeutic interactions enabled by videoconferencing (i.e., telepsychiatry) and computer-based interventions like online cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) platforms are widely advocated. This includes by programs such as the English National Health Service (NHS) Talking Therapies initiative, which has influenced discourse on the provision of psychological care at an international scale ( Pickersgill, 2019a ). Further, commonly and sometimes enthusiastically used smartphone applications (i.e., apps) have proliferated ( Flore, 2023 ). These leverage algorithms and AI to offer various mental health-oriented services, such as self-help, mood tracking and monitoring, and various self-guided or assisted interventions. Entwining various notions of neurobiology, psychological, and social experience, these apps, as well as chatbots accessed through web-browsers, often promise to help individuals live with or recover from feelings and experiences associated with psychiatric disorders. Digital interventions have been argued to have “recast the spatiality and temporality of healthcare” ( Trnka, 2016 , p. 248). They are sometimes framed as desirable precisely because of their distinctiveness from the praxis of conventional mental healthcare, and indeed through their elision of input from actual clinicians. Increasingly, digital tools and technologies are employed not only as interventions for mental ill-health, but are also on occasion positioned as a means of generating new kinds of information about patients and pathologies per se. In this chapter, we contextualise and historicise some of these developments, charting innovation and discussion about telepsychiatry, mobile health (also known as ‘mHealth’ or ‘m-health’), and what has more recently been called digital psychiatry or digital mental health. We argue that these have been partly constituted through the implicit and explicit extolment of various professional values and concerns in expectational statements about them, which interact with and propel characterisations of novelty. Value, Expectations, and Novelty in Biomedicine To analyse the emergence of digital mental health, we engage with the sociologies of value, expectations, and novelty. Professional values and concerns, and the value that professionals place in particular discourse and practices, are well known to constitute the terrain of biomedicine ( Freidson, 1970 ). So, too, does the economic value attributed to biological substances and processes ( Birch and Tyfield, 2013 ). Through widespread instantiation across a range of registers (e.g., public-facing documents and intra-professional conversations), values and that which is valued articulate and reciprocally constitute one another (Dussage et al., 2015). Articulations of value might exert disciplining effects on actual practices ( Lamont, 2012 ), with value consequently having an ambiguous existence as promise and actuality. Values also morph as the technologies to which they are associated traverse epistemic contexts and agendas. Take, for instance, the long established value for healthcare that is associated with genetic technologies: this has been reconstituted in terms of its potential to enhance the learning of children and young people as these techniques interact with the educational sciences ( Williamson et al., 2024 ). The rhetoric and instantiation of value can be strategically and more spontaneously deployed to support various professional endeavours ( Birch and Tyfield, 2013 ). This is particularly evident when the canonical biomedical value, the value of life itself, is used to justify continued symbolic and material investment in technological processes that are yet to demonstrate clinical worth. Paul Martin and colleagues (2008 ) provide a striking example of this through a case study of private umbilical cord blood stem cell banking. Martin et al. demonstrate how a market has emerged, underpinned by visions of cord blood as having potential therapeutic applications for assorted life-limiting or threatening disorders that a newborn baby might one day experience. Accordingly, the biomedical value of extending life – or at least, severe suffering – has played a key role in powering a promissory bioeconomy (ibid). More generally, diverse forms of therapeutic promise ( Rubin, 2008 , p. 13) have been constituted via various kinds of biomaterials, configuring these as promissory substrates ( Brown et al., 2006 , p. 330) to which hopes and capital – i.e., symbolic and economic values – are associated. Professional projects that might involve the strategic deployment of biomedical value and values to justify their necessity include practices of what – following Hacking (2004) – has been termed ‘performative nominalism’ ( Pickersgill, 2019b ). In other words, the act of naming and the ongoing utterance of names are central to the consolidation of ontologies and the economic and symbolic infrastructures that give life to these. This concept also underscores the role of agency in generating notions of novelty and value: co-emergence can be intentionally fostered by agents who reflexively reconfigure their identities in the process ( Galasso et al., 2024 ). Practices reminiscent of performative nominalism come from a variety of fields; sociologists of biomedical ethics, for instance, have demonstrated how ethical commentary shapes technoscientific development and thus the need for bioethicists ( Conrad and De Vries, 2011 ; Hedgecoe and Martin, 2003 ). Such insights emerge from wider work on the sociologies of expectations and novelty, which undergird much of the analysis presented here ( Borup et al., 2006 ; Brown, 2003 ; Pickersgill, 2021 ; Webster, 2002 ). In the case of biomedicine, the promise of new health technologies involves mobilising “a range of claims about their future therapeutic impact” ( Webster, 2002 , p. 443). This includes psychiatry, where investments in neuroscience, for instance, are predicated in part upon the promise that these will enhance clinical practice – aligning with social promises in various domains ( Pickersgill, 2023 ). Novelty is reflective and constitutive of high expectations; it is usefully regarded as a social accomplishment rather than quintessential to a technology, idea, or practice ( Pickersgill, 2019c ; Webster, 2002 ). In what follows, we draw on the inter-relating sociologies of value, expectations, and novelty to unpack the development and operations of digital mental health. Psychiatry and Technology What greater scourge could befall psychiatry than becoming impersonal – which means losing sight of the persona of the patient? The great technological advances that have taken place in medicine within the last three-quarter century raise this threat – the loss of the personal relationship with the patient. The whole tradition is based on healing and caring for the sick as persons, through constant personal contact between the doctor and the patient ( Bartemeier, 1952 , p. 1). These comments come from Leo H. Bartemeier’s 1952 Presidential Address to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In it, he sounded caution at the rise of techn(olog)ical approaches to clinical practice, and underscored the therapeutic import of interpersonal relationships. Bartemeier’s anxieties orientate us to how psychiatrists have long engaged with multiple technologies – including electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In the mid-twentieth century US, psychiatrists like Bartemeier were commonly orientated towards psychoanalysis; at the same time, interventions into neurological structure and function to treat mental ill-health were widely employed. Most controversially, these included electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lobotomy. Sadowsky (2006 , p. 22) has illuminated how receptive many psychoanalysts were to ECT, underscoring “the extent of eclecticism in American psychiatry”. For lobotomy, Raz (2008 , p. 387) demonstrated that “psychosurgical discourse adopted key concepts from psychoanalytical discourse” and vice versa. Hence, technical apparatuses within psychiatry can be understood to help direct practitioner attention, while also becoming enfolded within existing theoretical and operational regimes that embed particular ontologies and values. ‘Telepsychiatry’ is a more contemporary instantiation of a (partial) psychiatric embrace of an external technological innovation, namely, telemedicine. This was defined in the first editorial of the Telemedicine Journal as: “the delivery of care to patients anywhere in the world by combining communications technology with medical expertise” ( Goldberg, 1995 ). For decades now, clinicians and policymakers have advocated telemedicine explicitly in terms of two kinds of value: as a means of containing healthcare costs, and of enhancing access (Greene, 2022). In the UK, for instance, early policy announcements emphasised “the novelty and potential of telemedicine systems in a rhetoric that stresses the technology’s place in a paradigm shift in the conceptualization and organization of British health care” ( May et al., 2001 , p. 1890). It was in part through such discourse, and via journals, research groups, professional associations, and conferences that bore the name ‘telemedicine’, that the field was constituted. This can be regarded as a form of performative nominalism: the coining of ‘telemedicine’ and the badging of activities as such contributed to galvanising hopes and resources in ways that facilitated its consolidation. Telepsychiatry is defined by organisations like the APA as “any synchronous or asynchronous consultation with a patient or other practitioner by regular telephone, text, or videoconferencing” (2021, p. 1), and the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) as “a consultation between a patient and a psychiatrist conducted via videoconference or by telephone” ( RANZCP, 2023 ). Specific uses of telepsychiatry include medication management, as well as direct therapy ( APA, 2021 ; see, similarly, RANZCP, 2023 ). We can see, then, that this mode of technical practice straightforwardly contains a range of professional ontologies - from the overtly neurobiological to the explicitly psychosocial. Over the twenty-first century, the use of telepsychiatry has greatly expanded, with its instantiation purported to have “revealed opportunities to increase access to and continuity of psychiatric care” ( APA, 2021 , p. 1), and to promote “health equity by increasing access to care” (ibid). Accordingly, it is deemed “a critical component of the mental health delivery system” (ibid). Similarly, the New Zealand Telehealth Forum – funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Health – emphasises the importance of telehealth for ‘remote patients’ and clinicians in rural facilities ( NZ Telehealth, 2024 ). Research and practice initiatives around telepsychiatry in various nations have been configured with recourse to the value of access. With moral and clinical value overtly imbricated in this style of thought, epistemic endeavour has been orientated towards generating results that can be narrated through the value of access. Intervention trials are a case in point, with these commonly noting the utility of the technology in terms of enhancing admission into therapy for those who might otherwise be excluded from care (e.g. Kessler et al., 2009 ; O’Reilly et al., 2007 ). The impetus for the deployment of telepsychiatry was extended with the COVID-19 pandemic, where a range of countries used this in light of social distancing requirements. This shift has significantly extended outwards the imperative of access to care via telepsychiatry from a ‘traditional’ locus of rurality (e.g., Cano et al., 2021 ; Javed et al., 2020 ). Clinicians, though, have often been presented as resistant to telepsychiatry due to assumed deleterious effects on the relationship between doctor and patient deemed central to therapeutic engagement and success. As May et al. (2001) have shown, such matters have inflected the reception of telepsychiatry - and telemedicine more generally ( May et al, 2003 ) - for decades now. Responses from policymakers and those with a stake in technological innovation to perceived practitioner reticence are not always sympathetic. Clinicians are often castigated for not only valuing the ‘wrong’ thing (i.e., a particular therapeutic relationship versus access per se), but also for inaccurately characterising that which value judgements rest upon (i.e., that telepsychiatry does not ‘really’ trouble therapeutic relationships). Of course, such castigations themselves embed certain imaginaries of psyche and social context. Still, and despite what many might see as the success of telepsychiatry during the COVID-19 pandemic, the technological shaping of inter-subjective action constitutive of telepsychiatric practice remains an object of clinical concern. In sum, the praxis of telepsychiatry directs attention to two potentially conflicting values: access to care ‘versus’ the quality of the clinical encounter. On the one hand, and most importantly within promissory discourse, telepsychiatry might be valued as a novel means to increase access to therapy. Even half a century ago, access had been – in the words of APA Medical Director Walter Barton – “a concern of the APA for a long time” ( Barton, 1971 , p. 522). Today, the value of enhancing access continues to be (co-)constituted through a range of (inter)national policy and clinical debates. On the other hand, telepsychiatry is sometimes judged to have the potential to undercut a positive doctor-patient relationship understood by many therapists as holding considerable clinical (and personal) value. Its importance is an enduring trope within biomedicine; as Allan Tasman put it during an APA Presidential Address, it is of “central importance” to psychiatry ( Tasman, 2000 , p. 1762). The value of this relationship is also underscored by a wide-ranging literature describing various purported challenges to it, including industrial, economic, and political impacts on healthcare systems. ‘Mobilising’ Psychiatry In the previous section, we saw how telepsychiatry has been a major focus for psychiatric praxis concerning interweaving information and communication technologies into clinical practice. It represents a striking example of how critical biomedical values intersect, and configure field-building and the negotiation and reception of novelty. It is not the only illustration that could be advanced: online, often largely self-directed, therapy is another. Interactive and self-guided psychological therapy, particularly CBT, delivered via online platforms, apps, or computer software without real-time therapist interaction, has been a topic of international advocacy and debate. Numerous articles on this subject have been published in a range of journals focused on different national psychiatric communities. Evaluation studies of such modalities for CBT are also increasing, and evidence is being provided regarding the values of ‘acceptability’ and ‘cost effectiveness’ compared to other options. In the UK, for instance, online therapy portals like Beating the Blues have been rolled out across the NHS. They are endorsed by bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in England and the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN). In much the same way as in-person CBT as delivered through NHS Talking Therapies, web-based CBT is, in some senses, ontologically agnostic. Rather than aiming to navigate a comprehensive biographical account of distress, it focuses more straightforwardly on addressing the manifested cognitive-behavioural mechanisms underpinning it. Still, despite its high dose of pragmatism, this vision of the psyche might enfold particular neurobiological notions, given the (US) psychiatric origins of much of the theory and research styles informing contemporary CBT ( Pickersgill, 2019b ). Online therapies, where users navigate through pre-set text, audio, video, animation and exercises, tend to be associated with the treatment of so-called ‘mild to moderate’ instantiations of common conditions like depression, and deployed through psychological and primary care services. As well as pre-set content, newer chatbots tools are more interactive – such as ‘woebot’, a “fully automated conversational agent” ( Fitzpatrick et al., 2017 ). Considerations of telepsychiatric approaches as avenues for treatment vary more widely across a range of conditions, including those like schizophrenia – a contested and biomedically coded term - for which psychiatrists often take clinical responsibility (e.g., Henson et al., 2020 ). In recent years, telepsychiatry has become frequently operationalised through mobile phones, and web-based psychological therapies - once accessed largely through desktop computers - have also been ‘mobilised’ as smartphone apps. Next, we explore how apps are being promoted through the diverse field of mHealth. Promoting mobile health mHealth is a key facet of the matrix of illness, optimisation, and technology. As Williams et al (2015) have discussed, through mobile digital technologies, “patients, proto-patients and the wider public may now track their bodies, share their data, participate in online discussion and support groups, and use the information they gather to improve or optimise their health” (2015, p. 1045). Institutions like the APA (undated) contribute to constructing mHealth as a novel and important development, asserting that the “expanding use of mobile health (mHealth) technologies is unprecedented in the history of medicine”. Its value is seemingly evidenced in the “growing patient, clinical, government, and payer interest in the potential of mHealth technologies for psychiatric clinical care”. To this end, the APA convened a working group to interrogate mobile phone apps that purport to promote wellbeing and treat mental ill-health. This subsequently developed an evaluation model for psychiatrists to use when ascertaining whether an app might afford value for a given patient – to help users and clinicians rate apps and “make the best choice for clinically meaningful app use” ( Lagan et al., 2020 , p. 7) Deploying digital mental health can entail varying forms of responsibilisation. In telepsychiatry, the onus initially seems to lie with the clinician to cultivate new skills and care practices (although patients are expected to learn how to operate relevant technologies and software). With apps and chatbots, the responsibility lies more obviously with the user. This connects with established, broader values of ‘patient empowerment’ with over the last decade of more have become embroiled with digital mental health (e.g. WHO, 2013 , p. 14). At the same time, apps can also ‘passively’ collect data from people’s use of their phones, to generate clinically actionable psy-knowledge about mood and an assumed ‘mental state’ (De La Fabián, in press). This, in turn, requires different interpretative work from clinicians when such data is passed to them. Innovation and implementation of mHealth in the UK has for years been supported by a strong policy push towards innovation ( Mental Health Taskforce, 2016 , p. 38; National Information Board, 2014 ), one which increasingly also foregrounds AI ( DSIT et al, 2023 ). Until December 2021, the NHS provided an online app library where patients were encouraged to discover digital resources to manage and enhance their health. The NHS (2023) has now implemented “a new way of recommending apps”. People are suggested to create an account and use the NHS App to access services and recommendations. Yet, in the NHS App ‘Terms of Use’, a disclaimer states that the “NHS App and services within it are not a substitute for seeking medical advice. Always follow any medical advice given by your healthcare professionals” ( NHS, 2024 ). Clinical expertise thus remains valued, even as some (potential) patients are encouraged to contribute to their care in isolation from mental health practitioners. Epistemic and financial investment in research has come from funders like the Wellcome Trust and the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR); e.g., in the case of MindTech: “a national centre focussing on the development, adoption and evaluation of new technologies for mental healthcare and dementia” (see: http://www.mindtech.org.uk ). In the US, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has also actively sought to configure the value of mHealth, including through expectational statements. It was, for instance, explicitly flagged within the agency’s Strategic Plan for Research, with digital technologies, such as “mobile devices, information systems, artificial intelligence”, posited as holding value for addressing ongoing problems around access to healthcare ( NIMH, 2023a ). Like telepsychiatry before it, mHealth is thus presented as a technological fix to an issue of healthcare policy, planning, and delivery. Nevertheless, the value of direct clinical care remains inscribed into the NIMH’s Strategic Goals, with the institution still making clear that digital tools “may not replace a mental health professional” ( NIMH, 2023b ). Still, mobile technologies could give “the public, health care providers, and researchers new ways to access help, monitor progress, and increase understanding of mental wellbeing” (ibid) - conjuring expectations of novelty and import. As for specific uses, mobile apps are widely framed as having value in being able monitor symptoms and track individual ‘progress’, and purportedly facilitate large-scale, personalised, and context-specific data collection. Apparently, “Digital Health tools have the potential to truly improve our understanding of mental illness, to track the course of illnesses, and to provide as-needed mental health care” (ibid). Accordingly, they are promised to enhance the understanding of mental health trends, triggers, and interventions in everyday life. Presented as a novel offering to increase knowledge production, digital technologies for mental health through their data collection and processing potential could shape wider mental research agendas. Within funder discourses like those of the US NIMH, the entangling of the actual and the expectational re-creates enthusiasm, and underscores the novelty of digital approaches to mental health. These organisations are also folding digital mental health into the highly-financed regimes of ‘global health’, with specific funding for research in what the World Bank term ‘low and middle income countries’ (LMICs). The NIMH Centre for Global Mental Health Research has a ‘Digital Global Mental Health Program’, aiming “to substantially improve mental health outcomes in LMICs through innovative digital mental health technologies that improve the detection, assessment, prevention, and treatment of mental illnesses, and that improve the delivery, management, and scalability of mental health care” ( NIMH, 2024 ). The program fosters research across diverse domains to advance digital mental health technologies. Key priorities include developing and testing tools to enhance screening, diagnosis, treatment adherence, and the management of ill-health (ibid). One focus is on leveraging emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to improve health outcomes. The Program also emphasises efforts to optimise data capture, real-time assessment, and predictive analytics for at-risk populations, as well as strategies to boost engagement with digital tools. Another way to track the evolution and increasing visibility of mHealth is through the statements made about it by the psychiatrist and former NIMH Director Thomas Insel (in post 2002-2015). Once cautious about the use of technological interventions in mental health ( Shoham and Insel, 2011 ), Insel (2018) became an ever more vocal advocate of (mobile) digital techniques in psychiatric settings. When, during a 2013 Boston Globe interview, he was queried about the future of psychotherapy, Insel described how it “might be that what we call “psychotherapy” is a mobile app that you download and is crafted for your specific cognitive domain” ( Koven, 2013 ). A year later, Psychology Today asked Insel “What’s a clinical innovation you’re excited about?”; he responded: “Web-based and mobile CBT” ( Nemko, 2014 ). In 2015 Insel left the NIMH to work for Alphabet - a technology-driven American conglomerate with a broad range of subsidiary companies (most notably Google) - on device-orientated approaches to mental health. In a discussion with Fortune magazine, he accounted for this interest in technology as relating to wider shifts in understandings of psychopathology: where once disorders like depression were seen as “just a chemical imbalance”, now they can be considered “problems with how neural circuits are communicating” – an issue that “we may be able to modulate with devices” ( Sukel, 2015 ). Clearly, ostensibly psychological modalities can easily contain highly neurological ontologies. Insel subsequently had various private sector and policy roles, more recently co-founding Humanest Care, which provides mHealth services to individuals and organisations, and Vanna Health, which offers services to people living with “serious mental illness” – with a “member-facing digital platform […] available as an option” (see: www.vanna.health ). Subsequently, Insel (2022 , 2023 ) has gestured to an array of social, chemical, and technological solutions as offering the best way forward for people experiencing mental ill-health. In this respect, he seems to resonate with much mainstream opinion within a number of countries which have celebrated and entwined digital mental health within wider approaches to care and ontologies of psychopathology. Despite a widespread lauding of digital mental health, concerns have nevertheless also been raised about the security and commodification of the data that technologies might harness, given their commonly commercial origins ( Erikainen et al., 2019 ; Lupton, 2014 ). This includes mental health apps ( Egher, 2022 ), with one news piece, for instance, addressing the problem explicitly and bluntly: “Many app developers may be selling patient data for profit” ( Torous et al., 2016a ). What clinicians, patients, and developers value about digital mental health might thus be very different. In a review of opportunities and challenges associated with apps, psychiatrists Marley and Farooq (2015) also highlighted concerns about the clinical accuracy of information presented and the (lack of a) role of medical expertise in the development of some software – as well as overt risk to patients using apps partly as a consequence of errors and omissions. Discussions about the hazards of mHealth proliferating within psychiatric discourse underscore the increasingly everyday nature of mobile digital technologies for mental health, as well as the responsibility many clinicians feel regarding the need to better understand the risks and benefits associated with them when negotiating patients’ own questions and concerns. In part as a response to clinical concerns, mental health apps have come under increasing regulatory scrutiny (e.g., Zagorski, 2023 ). This includes interrogation of what, in fact, they are; are they, for instance, medical devices – and, if so, should they be regulated in ways congruent with other technologies that are perceived as such? As then UK Minister for Mental Health, Caroline Jackson, noted in 2022: “Digital mental health tools can be incredibly useful to help build resilience and prevent problems worsening, but it’s crucial these are regulated properly” ( MHRA, 2022 ). Such regulatory anxieties appear to have intensified within healthcare over the last decade or more, with the proliferation of devices with uses that further blur the lines between health, wellness, and recreation ( Faulkner, 2017 ; Lievevrouw et al., 2022 ). In the case of mental health apps, processes of potential ontological respecification ( Woolgar and Neyland, 2013 ) themselves produce notions of novelty. Expectational regulatory discourse also affirms the value of apps, with the (costly) attention paid to them implicitly and sometimes explicitly legitimated via their perceived significance. Through disseminating and defining the concept of mHealth, and generating ethical discourse around its instantiations, professional associations, funders, and governments contribute to reifying mHealth as an object of novelty and fascination. Within the concerns of physicians, the disclaimers of NHS websites, and the tacit and overt endorsement of mental health apps by health-related organisations, we can see at least two assemblages of value (beyond the enhancement of access) playing a role in this performative nominalism. For one, there is the therapeutic, political, and economic value of encouraging self-care (e.g., WHO, 2013 ). Public health in a range of countries commonly emphasises care of the self to stave off pathology and optimise present health, with clinicians and societies framing self-care as a means of empowering patients and cutting healthcare costs. In recent years, digital technologies – including apps – have featured prominently within discourses of patient self-care ( Henwood and Marent, 2019 ; Petrakaki et al., 2018 ). Second, there is the moral, personal, and professional value of clinical responsibility. When, for instance, the apps recommended by the NHS carry with them a disclaimer that they are not a substitute for clinical consultation, we can see how the ultimate responsibility for addressing mental ill-health is often formally apportioned to a healthcare professional, even if in practice rather more diverse mediations of responsibility play out. While articulations of clinical responsibility are necessarily demarcations of power and expertise, they are also configured as virtuous in legalistic healthcare contexts where responsibility is inscribed in hard and soft law. Hence, the formal holding of clinical responsibility and the performance of being a responsible clinician (in a broader sense) mutually reinforce and blur the lines between descriptive and normative dimensions of responsibility. Through reminders to patients and professionals that mobile technologies should not be substituted for clinical responsibility or through reassurances that clinicians have oversight of a process entailing digital mental health technologies, the value – and, indeed, virtue – of responsibility comes to legitimise endeavours to innovate the development and implementation of digital devices. Consolidating the digital in mental health 2017 saw the publication of The World Psychiatric Association-Lancet Psychiatry Commission on the Future of Psychiatry: a report “intended to stimulate thought, debate, and the change necessary for psychiatry to fulfil its potential as an innovative, effective, and inclusive medical specialty in the 21st century” ( Bhugra et al., 2017 , p. 776). An accompanying editorial highlighted “the apparently relentless progress of digital technology”, which has “the potential to render physical distance irrelevant to some areas of psychiatric practice” ( The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017 , p. 733). This, seemingly, created a new “challenge” to psychiatry “to use such innovations to enhance, rather than replace, the humane and humanistic aspects of practice” (ibid). Similar comments about progress and risks were made in the report’s Executive Summary: Digital technology might offer psychiatry the potential for radical change in terms of service delivery and the development of new treatments. However, it also carries the risk of commercialised, unproven treatments entering the medical marketplace with detrimental effect. Novel research methods, transparency standards, clinical evidence, and care delivery models must be created in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. Psychiatrists need to remain up to date and educated in the evolving digital world ( Bhugra et al., 2017 , p. 775). The Commission comprised six key sections, one of which was a segment specifically on ‘digital psychiatry’. This level of attention to the role of digital technology within mental health research and practice indicated a wider and sustained growth in prominence that, as we have seen, has been constituted through policy positioning, funding drivers, and researcher commentaries. What comprises ‘digital psychiatry’ in the Commission, as elsewhere today, is wide-ranging. It encompasses digital devices such as smartphones, wearable sensors, augmented reality glasses, virtual reality headsets, and smartwatches, along with their animative technological infrastructures like algorithms, machine learning, and AI. Smartphones were given primary prominence by the Commission, with smartphone apps juxtaposed with more futuristic possibilities such as augmented reality glasses. These were judged to be just “entering the mental health space” ( Bhugra et al., 2017 , p. 799), albeit in somewhat undefined ways which continue to lack sharpness and granularity. Through talk of apps and more advanced technologies that “are already projected to change health care” (ibid: , p. 799), digital psychiatry was presented as moving “beyond traditional telepsychiatry” (ibid: , p. 798) – with such novelty hence requiring focused attention and debate. The Commission and subsequent writings reviewing the state of digital psychiatry, or digital mental health more generally, point to the apparent inevitability of clinical integration. One recurrent figure within contemporary writings on technology and mental health is US psychiatrist John Torous. Director of the Digital Psychiatry Division at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, USA) and a co-author of the WPA-Lancet Psychiatry Commission, Torous can be regarded as having worked for some years now to actively constitute a dedicated field of digital psychiatry, in part through the documentation of its possibilities. This includes articles examining the ethical hurdles associated with using digital technologies and providing provisional roadmaps for navigating these (e.g. Torous et al., 2021 ; Torous and Nebeker, 2017 ). Through raising (and sometimes resolving) ethical issues, Torous and others contribute to performing the novelty and value of digital innovation in psychiatric praxis. ‘Digital psychiatry’, then, and ‘digital mental health’ more generally, appear not so much as a relatively bounded site of sociotechnical practice, but rather manifest through expectational discourse about the rise of digital technologies and their epistemic and clinical ramifications (cf. Brown, 2003 ; Hedgecoe and Martin, 2003 ). According to the WPA-Lancet Psychiatry Commission report, the “digital psychiatry revolution has arrived” ( Bhugra et al., 2017 , p. 798). Aside from apps to treat mental disorders, the report also highlighted the increasingly discussed possibility of enrolling these as sources of data for research into the nature of psychopathology. As clinical psychologist Dror Ben-Zeev wrote in the first column of an ongoing series in Psychiatric Services on technology and mental health: “Advancements in Web, mobile, sensor, and informatics technology can do more than serve as tools to enhance existing models of care. Novel technologies can help us better understand the very nature of mental illness” (2017, p. 107). With similar optimism, the NIMH (2023b) has described on one of their public-facing pages how “receiving widescale information from many people at the same time can increase researchers’ understanding of mental health and help them develop better interventions”. As indicated in the previous section, the NIMH – as with other funders – is now actively supporting work in this area. The direct data that people themselves enter into apps is widely considered to have considerable value, with new industry-academic partnerships emerging to capitalise on this potential. For example, the website of the mental health social networking app TalkLife bills itself as working “[t]ogether with researchers at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research” to “have developed unique classifiers to better understand and predict self-harm” ( TalkLife, 2024 ). Apparently: “Our world first platforms use this machine learning and human in the loop computing to be able to offer users assistance and services, specific to their individual circumstances, in real time”. The Commission also noted the importance of passive data obtained via some of the additional features of smartphones (like GPS) ( Bhugra et al., 2017 ). Other articles and commentaries have similarly flagged this, with sleep- and activity-tracking highlighted as means of generating new temporally fine-grained insights into psychopathology as experienced in everyday life (e.g. Marzano et al., 2015 ; Mendes et al., 2022 ). Threading through all these commentaries is another biomedical value: the augmentation of the insights, learning, and understanding of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals and the expansion of the biomedical evidence base upon which this is commonly regarded as resting. According to Torous et al. (2016b) , “Smartphone sensors and phone usage patterns, when coupled with appropriate statistical learning tools, are able to capture various social and behavioural manifestations of illnesses, in naturalistic settings, as lived and experienced by patients” (p. 1). In essence, technologies might contribute to this so-called ‘digital phenotyping’ ( Birk et al., 2021 ; Birk and Samuel, 2020 ), imparting new means of researching mental ill-health - and hence of knowing individual patients. Accordingly, perceptions of the very nature of psychopathology could – as we have seen, some researchers and clinicians actively enjoin – also be transformed, while longstanding processes of medicalisation and neuropsychologisation could be reenergised ( De La Fabián et al., 2023 ). Looking back, looking forward Innovations in digital mental health research, promotion, and treatment have generated excitement internationally (e.g. Rojas et al., 2019 ; Torous et al., 2021 ) – with one corollary of this being concern and disquiet. In this chapter, we have sought to historicise and enrich contextual understandings of these digital developments. We have seen how contemporary uses and future possibilities are connected in ways that imply psychotechnical novelty and the value and inevitability of further innovation. Through discussions of scenarios emerging from commentaries on digital mental health, some organisations and individuals adopt roles as “mediators of hope” ( Martin et al., 2008 , p. 127) about the prospects of technologies for patient benefit. Indeed, some even act as what we call “inoculators of certainty” ( Crespo Suarez and Pickersgill, in press ) concerning the psychiatric body politic and the positive role of digital technologies. In so doing, they contribute to a “discourse of inevitability” ( Leonardi, 2008 ; Pickersgill, 2019a , 2024) about the imbrication of mental health praxis and technological artefacts that help to realise futures for understanding and treating mental ill-health that entwine not only psyche and society but also the neurobiological. Among such mediators, agencies like the NIMH have the economic capacity to materialise a selection of the innovations they anticipate and the discourses they promote. Strategies of field-building consequently occur with and through leveraging value and values, or concrete investment and change. These appear to be playing out with a view to realising and further propelling such expenditure and innovation. Some of these strategies can be characterised as practices of performative nominalism. In this regard, purported members of ostensibly new fields act, in effect, to talk these into existence. Through mirroring such rhetoric, funders and governments themselves contribute actively to this consolidation. As the sociology of expectations reminds us, promissory statements are vitally important to the constitution of biomedical endeavours and the generation of bio(medical) value(s) ( Rubin, 2008 ; Tyfield and Birch, 2013 ) – including within the domain of digital health ( Erikainen et al., 2019 ; Geiger and Gross, 2017 ). Indeed, when uttered so often they can make alternative futures hard to imagine and the roads that might take psychiatry there challenging if not impossible to traverse – contributing to a form of path dependency. Within expectational statements, the implicit and explicit extolment of biomedical value and values plays an important legitimising function. Emphases of different values about the technological mediation of mental health care have shifted over time as the attention of psychiatry has ranged around various modalities. To-date, the moral, clinical, and economic value of enhancing access to treatment has been key to propelling technological innovation in mental health – as, more recently, has the encouragement of self-care. Today, mobile technologies are also being folded into regimes of mental health data collection, constituted through the value of the enhancement of clinical wisdom. In particular, service-orientated research is being conducted and urged to ascertain the potential for information gleaned from mobile phones (including via apps and activity monitoring functions) to assist with clinical decision-making. This work has been argued to have the potential to reshape therapeutic encounters, whereby the epistemic salience of patient testimony regarding their subjective experience is dissipated as objectivity is delegated to devices. Investigations are also emerging into how digital technologies might provide insights into the nature - especially the temporalities - of symptoms like low-mood ( Malhi et al., 2017 ; Merikangas et al., 2019 ). Research in this vein resonates with broader epistemological shifts in psychiatry into the analysis of symptoms and (often neurobiological) mechanisms of psychopathology, which have rendered problematic the existence of established nosological categories like schizophrenia. Imbricating with all of this is another biomedical value: maintaining a positive doctor-patient relationship. It is striking how much the editorial accompanying the aforementioned WPA-Lancet Psychiatry Commission report, for instance, which advanced concerns about the “challenge” of innovation for “humane and humanistic aspects of practice” ( The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017 , p. 733), echoes the worries of psychiatrists in decades past. In particular, Leo Bartemeier’s anxieties about the “threat” of technology to the psychiatrists’ “personal relationship with the patient”, set out 65 years ago in his APA Presidential Address, continue to resonate. Conclusion While digital mental health has been much vaunted, uncertainties remain concerning how readily and in what ways mental health professionals will accommodate digital technology in their practice and how patients and publics will respond and reconfigure emergent strategies of research and care ( Meadows and Hine, 2024 ). This is even as the direction of travel towards more, rather than less digitisation is being encouraged through multiple discourses and direct enjoinments. Nevertheless, psychiatric practice is nothing if not eclectic and pragmatic. Further, as we have seen, technologically facilitated psychiatry may contain multiple and intersecting biological, psychological, and social ontologies of subjective distress. This enables, to an extent, the elision of customary debates within the mental health professions about how an emerging therapeutic modality could intensify or counter one particular ontological commitment or another – which might positively impact adoption. Consequently, it does not feel unreasonable to anticipate a greater instantiation of digital technology within mental health than the aforementioned concerns might suggest. That said, we are of course mindful of contributing ourselves to the aforementioned expectational discourse of inevitability in digital mental health. Regardless, the normative dimensions of (any) digital instantiations within psychiatric praxis will certainly continue to bear sociological scrutiny. Collectively, the processes characterised in this chapter underscore the need for ongoing, indeed revitalised, research on mental health, technology, and society. Potential areas of exploration include the impact on patient agency and autonomy; the shifting dynamics of dominance and marginalisation of different actors, institutions, and discourses; the normativities and implications of datafication; and the reconfiguring of professional, patient, and psychopathological ontologies. Acknowledgements We want to thank Alex Faulkner and the reviewers for insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. We are also grateful to the support of the Wellcome Trust for supporting this research [209519/Z/17/Z; 106612/Z/14/Z; 094205/Z/10/Z]. Work undertaken through additional grants funded by the Wellcome Trust [223615/Z/21/Z], the UK Medical Research Council [MR/S035818/1; MC_PC_MR/R01910X/1], the UK Economic and Social Research Council [ES/S013873/1], the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/W011417/1], and Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) [72210001] has further informed our thinking, and we likewise acknowledge their support. Endnotes 1 This chapter develops from and extends arguments made within the following texts: Pickersgill, M. (2019a) ‘Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis’, Sociology of Health & Illness , 41, S1, 16–301 [ PMC free article : PMC6849545 ] [ PubMed : 30175439 ]; Crespo Suarez, J. and Pickersgill, M. (in press) De la telepsiquiatría a la salud mental digital: Realizando expectativas, novedad y virtud en psiquiatría in: De La Fabián, R., Jiménez, A., and Pizarro, F. (eds). Are We Digital Subjects? Algorithms, Psy Knowledges, and the Digitalization of Everyday Life, Santiago: RIL Editores. References Adams, S., Lancaster, K., & Rhodes, T. (2023). Undoing elimination: modelling Australia’s way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global Public Health , 18 (1), 2195899. 10.1080/17441692.2023.2195899 [ PubMed : 37054450 ] [ CrossRef ] American Psychiatric Association [APA]. (2021). Position Statement on Telemedicine in Psychiatry . Retrieved 19/06/2024 from https://www ​.psychiatry ​.org/getattachment ​/a9405e26-3a69-4e9d-95b6-5df9568fb443 ​/Position-Telemedicine-in-Psychiatry.pdf American Psychiatric Association [APA]. (undated). App Advisor . Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.psychiatry ​.org/psychiatrists ​/practice/mental-health-apps Bartemeier, L. H. (1952). Presidential address. American Journal of Psychiatry , 109 (1), xiii-5-7. [ PubMed : 14923915 ] Barton, W. E. (1971). Report of the Medical Director. American Journal of Psychiatry , 128 (4), 522–524. Ben-Zeev, D. (2017). Technology in mental health: creating new knowledge and inventing the future of services. Psychiatr Services , 68 (2), 107–108. [ PubMed : 27974001 ] Bhugra, D., Tasman, A., Pathare, S., Priebe, S., Smith, S., Torous, J., Arbuckle, M. R., Langford, A., et al. (2017). The WPA-Lancet Psychiatry commission on the future of psychiatry. The Lancet Psychiatry , 4 (10), 775–818. [ PubMed : 28946952 ] Birch, K., & Tyfield, D. (2013). Theorizing the bioeconomy. Science, Technology, & Human Values , 38(3), 299–327. Birk, R., Lavis, A., Lucivero, F., & Samuel, G. (2021). For what it’s worth: unearthing the values embedded in digital phenotyping for mental health. Big Data & Society , 8 (2), 20539517211047319. 10.1177/20539517211047319 [ CrossRef ] Birk, R., & Samuel, G. (2020). Can digital data diagnose mental health problems? A sociological exploration of ‘digital phenotyping’. Sociology of Health & Illness , 42 (8), 1873–1887. [ PubMed : 32914445 ] Borup, M., Brown, N., Konrad, K., & Van Lente, H. (2006). The sociology of expectations in science and technology. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management , 18 (3–4), 285–298. Brown, N. (2003). Hope against hype: accountability in biopasts, presents and futures. Science Studies , 16 (2), 3–21. Brown, N., Kraft, A., & Martin, P. (2006). The promissory pasts of blood stem cells. BioSocieties , 1 (3), 329–348. Cano, J. F., González-Díaz, J. M., Vallejo-Silva, A., Alzate-García, M., & Córdoba-Rojas, R. N. (2021). El rol del psiquiatra colombiano en medio de la pandemia de COVID-19. Revista Colombiana de Psiquiatría , 50 (3), 184–188. [ PMC free article : PMC8214169 ] [ PubMed : 34629560 ] Conrad, E. C., & De Vries, R. (2011). Field of dreams: a social history of neuroethics. In M. Pickersgill, I. V. Keulen, & B. K. Rothman (Eds.), Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences . Bingley: Emerald, pp. 299–324. Crespo Suarez, J. and Pickersgill, M. (in press) De la telepsiquiatría a la salud mental digital: Realizando expectativas, novedad y virtud en psiquiatría in: De La Fabián, R., Jiménez, A., and Pizarro, F. (eds). Are We Digital Subjects? Algorithms, Psy Knowledges, and the Digitalization of Everyday Life , Santiago: Ediciones UDP. De La Fabián, R., Jiménez-Molina, Á., & Pizarro Obaid, F. (2023). A critical analysis of digital phenotyping and the neuro-digital complex in psychiatry. Big Data & Society , 10 (1), 20539517221149097. 10.1177/20539517221149097 [ CrossRef ] Department for Science, Innovation and Technology [DSIT], Department of Health and Social Care [DHSC], The Rt Hon Michelle Donelan, The Rt Hon Steve Barclay MP and The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP (2023) New £100 million fund to capitalise on AI’s game-changing potential in life sciences and healthcare . 29 October 2023. Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.gov.uk/government ​/news/new-100-million-fund-to-capitalise-on-ais-game-changing-potential-in-life-sciences-and-healthcare Dussauge, I., Helgesson, C-F., and Lee, F. (eds.) Value Practices in the Life Sciences & Medicine , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Egher, C. (2022) Digital Healthcare and Expertise: Mental Health and New Knowledge Practices , London: Palgrave. Erikainen S, Pickersgill M, Cunningham-Burley S., Chan S. (2019) Patienthood and participation in the digital era. Digital Health , 23(5): 2055207619845546. doi: 10.1177/2055207619845546. [ PMC free article : PMC6482654 ] [ PubMed : 31041112 ] [ CrossRef ] Faulkner, A. (2017). Blood informatics: negotiating the regulation and usership of personal devices for medical care and recreational self-monitoring. In: Lynch, R. and Farrington, C. (eds.) Quantified Lives and Vital Data: Exploring Health and Technology through Personal Medical Devices . London: Palgrave, pp. 203–228. Fitzpatrick, K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2017). Delivering cognitive behavior therapy to young adults with symptoms of depression and anxiety using a fully automated conversational agent (Woebot): A randomized controlled trial. JMIR mental health , 4 (2), e19–e19. 10.2196/mental.7785 [ PMC free article : PMC5478797 ] [ PubMed : 28588005 ] [ CrossRef ] Flore, J. (2023). The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health . London: Palgrave. Freidson, E. (1970). Profession of Medicine:A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge . New York: Harper & Row. Galasso, I., Erikainen, S., Pickersgill, M., and Testa, G. (2024) “Different names for the same thing”? Novelty, expectations, and performative nominalism in personalized and precision medicine’, Social Theory & Health , 22 (2), 139–155. Geiger, S., & Gross, N. (2017). Does hype create irreversibilities? Affective circulation and market investments in digital health. Marketing Theory , 17 (4), 435–454. Goldberg, M. (1995). Telemedicine Journal: a new journal for a new age. Telemedicine Journal , 1 (1), 1–2. 10.1089/tmj.1.1995.1.1 [ CrossRef ] Hacking, I. (2004). Historical Ontology . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Hedgecoe, A., & Martin, P. (2003). The Drugs Don’t Work: Expectations and the Shaping of Pharmacogenetics. Social Studies of Science , 33 (3), 327–364. [ PubMed : 14621671 ] Henson, P., Barnett, I., Keshavan, M., & Torous, J. (2020). Towards clinically actionable digital phenotyping targets in schizophrenia. npj Schizophrenia , 6 (1), 13–13. 10.1038/s41537-020-0100-1 [ PMC free article : PMC7200667 ] [ PubMed : 32372059 ] [ CrossRef ] Henwood, F., & Marent, B. (2019). Understanding digital health: Productive tensions at the intersection of sociology of health and science and technology studies. Sociology of Health & Illness , 41 (S1), 1–15. [ PubMed : 31599984 ] Insel, T. (2018). Digital phenotyping: a global tool for psychiatry. World Psychiatry , 17 (3), 276–277. [ PMC free article : PMC6127813 ] [ PubMed : 30192103 ] Insel, T. (2022). Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health . New York: Penguin. Insel, T. (2023). Digital mental health care: five lessons from Act 1 and a preview of Acts 2–5. npj Digital Medicine , 6 (1), 9. 10.1038/s41746-023-00760-8 [ PMC free article : PMC9879995 ] [ PubMed : 36702920 ] [ CrossRef ] Javed, A., Mohandas, E., & De Sousa, A. (2020). The interface of psychiatry and covid-19: Challenges for management of psychiatric patients. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences , 36 (5), 1133–1136. [ PMC free article : PMC7372677 ] [ PubMed : 32704300 ] Kessler, D., Lewis, G., Kaur, S., Wiles, N., King, M., Weich, S., Sharp, D., Araya, R., Hollinghurst, S., & Peters, T. (2009). Therapist-delivered internet psychotherapy for depression in primary care: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet , 374 (9690), 628–634. [ PubMed : 19700005 ] Koven, S. (2013, 16th December 2013). Taking a new approach to psychiatric research Retrieved 20/12/24 from: https://www ​.bostonglobe ​.com/lifestyle/health-wellness ​/2013/12 ​/16/with-thomas-insel-director-national-institute-mental-health ​/nZ9Qjw88QmJtXWNQft1CFN/story.html . Lagan, S., Aquino, P., Emerson, M. R., Fortuna, K., Walker, R., & Torous, J. (2020). Actionable health app evaluation: translating expert frameworks into objective metrics. npj Digital Medicine , 3 (1), 100. 10.1038/s41746-020-00312-4 [ PMC free article : PMC7393366 ] [ PubMed : 32821855 ] [ CrossRef ] Lamont, M. (2012). Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. Annual Review of Sociology . 38: 201–222. Leonardi, P. (2008). Indeterminacy and the Discourse of Inevitability in International Technology Management. The Academy of Management Review , 33 (4), 975–984. Lievevrouw, E., Marelli, L., & Van Hoyweghen, I. (2022). The FDA’s standard-making process for medical digital health technologies: co-producing technological and organizational innovation. BioSocieties , 17 (3), 549–576. [ PMC free article : PMC8116827 ] [ PubMed : 34002115 ] Lupton, D. (2014). Critical Perspectives on Digital Health Technologies. Sociology Compass , 8 (12), 1344–1359. Malhi, G. S., Hamilton, A., Morris, G., Mannie, Z., Das, P., & Outhred, T. (2017). The promise of digital mood tracking technologies: are we heading on the right track? Evidence Based Mental Health , 20 (4), 102–107. 10.1136/eb-2017-102757 [ PMC free article : PMC10516397 ] [ PubMed : 28855245 ] [ CrossRef ] Marley, J., & Farooq, S. (2015). Mobile telephone apps in mental health practice: uses, opportunities and challenges. BJPsych Bulletin , 39 (6), 288–290. [ PMC free article : PMC4706212 ] [ PubMed : 26755988 ] Martin, P., Brown, N., & Turner, A. (2008). Capitalizing hope: the commercial development of umbilical cord blood stem cell banking. New genetics and society , 27 (2), 127–143. 10.1080/14636770802077074 [ CrossRef ] Marzano, L., Bardill, A., Fields, B., Herd, K., Veale, D., Grey, N., & Moran, P. (2015). The application of mHealth to mental health: opportunities and challenges. The Lancet. Psychiatry , 2 (10), 942–948. [ PubMed : 26462228 ] May, C., Gask, L., Atkinson, T., Ellis, N., Mair, F., & Esmail, A. (2001). Resisting and promoting new technologies in clinical practice: the case of telepsychiatry. Social science & medicine (1982) , 52 (12), 1889–1901. [ PubMed : 11352414 ] May, C., Harrison, R., Finch, T., MacFarlane, A., Mair, F., & Wallace, P. (2003). Understanding the normalization of telemedicine services through qualitative vvaluation. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA , 10 (6), 596–604. [ PMC free article : PMC264438 ] [ PubMed : 12925553 ] Meadows, R., & Hine, C. (2024). Entanglements of technologies, agency and selfhood: exploring the complexity in attitudes toward mental health chatbots. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry , 48 (4), 840–857. [ PMC free article : PMC11570556 ] [ PubMed : 39153178 ] Mendes, J., Moura, I., Van de Ven, P., Viana, D., Silva, F., Coutinho, L., Teixeira, S., Rodrigues, J, & Teles, A. (2022). Sensing apps and public data sets for digital phenotyping of mental health: systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research , 24 (2), e28735. 10.2196/28735 [ PMC free article : PMC8895287 ] [ PubMed : 35175202 ] [ CrossRef ] Mental Health Taskforce. (2016). The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health: A Report from the Independent Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England . Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.england.nhs ​.uk/wp-content/uploads ​/2016/02/Mental-Health-Taskforce-FYFV-final.pdf Merikangas, K. R., Swendsen, J., Hickie, I. B., Cui, L., Shou, H., Merikangas, A. K., Zhang, J., Lamers, F., Crainiceanu, C., Volkow, N. D., & Zipunnikov, V. (2019). Real-time mobile monitoring of the dynamic associations among motor activity, energy, mood, and sleep in adults with bipolar disorder. JAMA Psychiatry , 76 (2), 190–198. [ PMC free article : PMC6439734 ] [ PubMed : 30540352 ] MHRA (2022) Press Release: Mental health funding of £1.8m welcomed by MHRA and NICE to explore regulation of digital mental health tools. 10 October 2022. Retreived 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.gov.uk/government ​/news/mental-health-funding-of-18m-welcomed-by-mhra-and-nice-to-explore-regulation-of-digital-mental-health-tools#:~:text=The ​%20Medicines ​%20and%20Healthcare ​%20products,regulating ​%20digital%20mental ​%20health%20tools Mohr, D., Weingardt, K., Reddy, M., & Schueller, S. (2017). Three problems with current digital mental health research … and three things we can do about them. Psychiatric Services , 68 (5), 427–429. [ PMC free article : PMC6903906 ] [ PubMed : 28412890 ] National Information Board. (2014). Personalised Health and Care 2020: Using Data and Technology to Transform Outcomes for Patients and Citizens. A Framework for Action . H. Government/NHS. Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.gov.uk/government ​/uploads/system ​/uploads/attachment_data ​/file/384650/NIB_Report.pdf National Institutes of Mental Health [NIMH]. (2023a). National Institute of Mental Health Strategic Plan For Research . NIMH. Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.nimh.nih ​.gov/sites/default/files ​/documents/about ​/strategic-planning-reports ​/NIMH_Strategic ​_Plan_for_Research_2023_Update.pdf National Institutes of Mental Health [NIMH]. (2023b). Technology and the Future of Mental Health Treatment . Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.nimh.nih ​.gov/health/topics/technology-and-the-future-of-mental-health-treatment National Institutes of Mental Health [NIMH]. (2024). Digital Global Mental Health Program . Retrieved 14/11/2024 from: https://www ​.nimh.nih ​.gov/about/organization ​/cgmhr/digital-global-mental-health-program Nemko, M. (2014). The Present and Future of Treatment for Depression . 30 September 2014. Retrieved 14/11/2024 from: https://www ​.psychologytoday ​.com/intl/blog ​/how-do-life/201409 ​/the-present-and-future-treatment-depression NHS. (2023). NHS Apps Library . Retrieved 18/06/2023 from: https://digital ​.nhs.uk ​/services/nhs-apps-library NHS. (2024). NHS Apps terms of use. Version 5.2, 25 November 2024 . Retrieved 20/12/2024 from https://digital ​.nhs.uk ​/services/nhs-apps-library NZ Telehealth. (2024). About Telehealth . Retrieved 19/06/2024 from: https://www ​.telehealth ​.org.nz/health-provider ​/what-is-telehealth/ O’Reilly, R., Bishop, J., Maddox, K., Hutchinson, L., Fisman, M., & Takhar, J. (2007). Is telepsychiatry equivalent to face-to-face psychiatry? Results from a randomized controlled equivalence trial. Psychiatry Services , 58 (6), 836–843. [ PubMed : 17535945 ] Petrakaki, D., Hilberg, E., and Waring, J. (2018) Between empowerment and self-discipline: Governing patients’ conduct through technological self-care. Social Science & Medicine , 213 (9), 146–153. [ PMC free article : PMC6137078 ] [ PubMed : 30081356 ] Pickersgill, M. (2019a). Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis. Sociology of Health & Illness , 41 (1), 16–30. [ PMC free article : PMC6849545 ] [ PubMed : 30175439 ] Pickersgill, M. (2019b). Access, accountability, and the proliferation of psychological therapy: On the introduction of the IAPT initiative and the transformation of mental healthcare. Social Studies of Science , 49 (4), 627–650. [ PMC free article : PMC7613166 ] [ PubMed : 30905265 ] Pickersgill, M. (2019c). Psychiatry and the sociology of novelty: negotiating the US National Institute of Mental Health “Research Domain Criteria” (RDoC). Science, Technology, & Human Values , 44 (4), 612–633. [ PMC free article : PMC6557003 ] [ PubMed : 31327882 ] Pickersgill, M. (2021). Negotiating novelty: constructing the novel within scientific accounts of epigenetics. Sociology , 55 (3), 600–618. [ PMC free article : PMC8188992 ] [ PubMed : 34163091 ] Pickersgill, M. (2023) Neuroscience, novelty, and the sociology of the brain. Petersen, A. (ed.) Handbook on the Sociology of Health and Medicine, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 525–540. Raz, M. (2008). Between the ego and the icepick: psychosurgery, psychoanalysis, and psychiatric discourse. Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 82 (2), 387–420. [ PubMed : 18622073 ] Rojas, G., Martínez, V., Martínez, P., Franco, P., & Jiménez-Molina, Á. (2019). Improving mental health care in developing countries through digital technologies: a mini narrative review of the Chilean case. Frontiers in Public Health , 7 . 10.3389/fpubh.2019.00391 [ PMC free article : PMC6933524 ] [ PubMed : 31921754 ] [ CrossRef ] Rubin, B. (2008). Therapeutic promise in the Discourse of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Science as Culture , 17 (1), 13–27. Sadowsky, J. (2006). Beyond the metaphor of the pendulum: electroconvulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, and the styles of American psychiatry. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences , 61 (1), 1–25. [ PubMed : 16239498 ] Shoham, V., & Insel, T. (2011). Rebooting for whom? Portfolios, technology, and personalized intervention. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 6 (5), 478–482. [ PubMed : 26168199 ] Sukel, K. (2015). Google’s NIH health hire: Smartphones can detect mental health breakdowns , 17 September 2015 Retrieved 12/03/2024: http://fortune ​.com/2015 ​/09/17/googles-nih-health-hire-smartphones-can-detect-mental-health-breakdowns/ TalkLife. (2024). What is TalkLife? TalkLife. Retrieved 20/12/2024 from: https://www ​.talklife.com/about Tasman, A. (2000). Presidential address: the doctor-patient relationship. American Journal of Psychiatry , 157 (11), 1762–1768. [ PubMed : 11058471 ] The Lancet Psychiatry. (2017). Editorial: New wave. The Lancet Psychiatry , 4 (10), 733–733. [ PubMed : 28946944 ] The Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists [RANZCP]. (2023). Professional Practice Guideline 19. Telehealth in Psychiatry . Retrieved 26/06/2023 from: https://www ​.ranzcp.org ​/getmedia/2148dcf0-9fcd-4dc2-80bb-4bef2f44f2ca ​/ppg-19-telehealth-in-psychiatry-oct-2023-v2.pdf Torous, J., Chan, S., & Luo, J. (2016a). Are your patients using ‘digital supplements’?. Psychiatric News , 51 (22), 10.1176/appi.pn.2016.11b16 [ CrossRef ] Torous, J., Kiang, M., Lorme, J., & Onnela, J. (2016b). New tools for new research in psychiatry: a scalable and customizable platform to empower data driven smartphone research. JMIR Mental Health , 3 (2), e16. 10.2196/mental.5165 [ PMC free article : PMC4873624 ] [ PubMed : 27150677 ] [ CrossRef ] Torous, J., & Nebeker, C. (2017). Navigating ethics in the digital age: Introducing connected and open research ethics (CORE), a tool for researchers and institutional review boards. Journal of Medical Internet Research , 19 (2), e38–e38. 10.2196/jmir.6793 [ PMC free article : PMC5322198 ] [ PubMed : 28179216 ] [ CrossRef ] Torous, J., Bucci, S., Bell, I. H., Kessing, L. V., Faurholt-Jepsen, M., Whelan, P., Carvalho, A. F., Keshavan, M., Linardon, J., & Firth, J. (2021). The growing field of digital psychiatry: current evidence and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality. World Psychiatry , 20 (3), 318–335 [ PMC free article : PMC8429349 ] [ PubMed : 34505369 ] Trnka, S. (2016). Digital care: agency and temporality in young people’s use of health apps. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society , 2 , 248–265. 10.17351/ests2016.119 [ CrossRef ] Webster, A. (2002). Innovative health technologies and the social: redefining health, medicine and the body. Current Sociology , 50 (3), 443–457. Williams, S., Coveney, C., & Meadows, R. (2015). ‘M-apping’ sleep? Trends and transformations in the digital age. Sociology of Health & Illness , 37 (7), 1039–1054. [ PubMed : 26182959 ] Williamson, B., Kotouza, D., Pickersgill, M., and Pykett, J. (2024) ‘Infrastructuring educational genomics: associations, architectures, and apparatuses’, Postdigital Science and Education , 6 , 1143–1172 10.1007/s42438-023-00451-3. [ PMC free article : PMC11698303 ] [ PubMed : 39759182 ] [ CrossRef ] Woolgar, S. and Neyland, D. (2013) Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability . Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Health Organisation [WHO]. (2013). Mental Health Action Plan: 2013-2020 . Retrieved 26/06/2023 from: http://apps ​.who.int/iris ​/bitstream/handle ​/10665/89966/9789241506021_eng ​.pdf;jsessionid ​=BA0F36F7931A83B9A956063E52793754?sequence=1 Zagorski, N. (2023) Digital mental health apps need more regulatory oversight. Psychiatric News , 58 (12) 10.1176/appi.pn.2023.12.11.35 [ CrossRef ] Alex Faulkner 2026. Monographs, or book chapters, which are outputs of Wellcome Trust funding have been made freely available as part of the Wellcome Trust's open access policy Bookshelf ID: NBK621201 PMID: 41802039 Contents Share Views PubReader Print View Cite this Page Pickersgill M, Crespo Suarez J. Towards Digital Mental Health? Entwining Expectations, Novelty, and Value. In: Faulkner A, editor. A Research Agenda in Biomedicine and Society. Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar Publishing; 2026. PDF version of this page (212K) In this Page Abstract Introduction Value, Expectations, and Novelty in Biomedicine Psychiatry and Technology ‘Mobilising’ Psychiatry Promoting mobile health Consolidating the digital in mental health Looking back, looking forward Conclusion Acknowledgements References Other titles in this collection Wellcome Trust–Funded Monographs and Book Chapters Related information PMC PubMed Central citations PubMed Links to PubMed Similar articles in PubMed Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis. [Sociol Health Illn. 2019] Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis. Pickersgill M. Sociol Health Illn. 2019 Oct; 41 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):16-30. Epub 2018 Sep 2. Review Depressing time: Waiting, melancholia, and the psychoanalytic practice of care. [The Time of Anthropology: Stud...] Review Depressing time: Waiting, melancholia, and the psychoanalytic practice of care. Salisbury L, Baraitser L. The Time of Anthropology: Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics. 2020 Prevalence, attitudes and concerns toward telepsychiatry and mobile health self-management tools among patients with mental disorders during and after the COVID-19 pandemic: a nationwide survey in Poland from 2020 to 2023. [Front Psychiatry. 2023] Prevalence, attitudes and concerns toward telepsychiatry and mobile health self-management tools among patients with mental disorders during and after the COVID-19 pandemic: a nationwide survey in Poland from 2020 to 2023. Dominiak M, Gędek A, Antosik AZ, Mierzejewski P. Front Psychiatry. 2023; 14:1322695. Epub 2024 Jan 8. Review Digital Technologies for Schizophrenia Management: A Descriptive Review. [Sci Eng Ethics. 2021] Review Digital Technologies for Schizophrenia Management: A Descriptive Review. Chivilgina O, Elger BS, Jotterand F. Sci Eng Ethics. 2021 Apr 9; 27(2):25. Epub 2021 Apr 9. Review Telepsychiatry in an Era of Digital Mental Health Startups. [Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2023] Review Telepsychiatry in an Era of Digital Mental Health Startups. Achtyes ED, Glenn T, Monteith S, Geddes JR, Whybrow PC, Martini J, Bauer M. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2023 Jun; 25(6):263-272. Epub 2023 May 11. See reviews... See all... Recent Activity Clear Turn Off Turn On Towards Digital Mental Health? Entwining Expectations, Novelty, and Value - A Re... Towards Digital Mental Health? Entwining Expectations, Novelty, and Value - A Research Agenda in Biomedicine and Society Your browsing activity is empty. Activity recording is turned off. Turn recording back on See more... Follow NCBI Twitter Facebook LinkedIn GitHub NCBI Insights Blog Connect with NLM Twitter Facebook Youtube National Library of Medicine 8600 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20894 Web Policies FOIA HHS Vulnerability Disclosure Help Accessibility Careers NLM NIH HHS USA.gov