About this Research Topic

Background

Mental health is a growing concern, and external crises, both local and global, can proliferate individual and community-cascading mental health ramifications. It becomes critically important to not only gauge the mental health needs of individuals and communities but also to provide proactive, timely, and tailored support in crisis circumstances. However, there are gaps in current research and practice to effectively tackle mental health, and amidst crises, in particular. In addition, often, the mental health needs of vulnerable and marginalized populations remain unrealized and unattended to. In recent years, digital footprints of data in various forms (e.g., wearables, smartphones, sensors, social media and web, etc.) have shown promises in mental health understanding and interventions. The ubiquity and widespread use of various forms of technologies, have facilitated collecting rich and longitudinal data both in real-time and on-scale for a better understanding of the need and the effectiveness of mental health care. Digital platforms have been shown to accelerate the delivery of mental health care and brought affordable and accessible mental health care within reach of the individuals and communities that need it. Parallelly, researchers have also highlighted the gaps in the literature that pertain to the ethical concerns about gauging mental health from digital traces.

Therefore, this Research Topic aims to highlight and encourage works of how we can transition into the next phase of digital and technological research and interventions in mental health, with a focus on crises and anomalous circumstances (e.g., natural disasters, pandemics, recession, human-made disasters like gun violence, shooting events, wars, etc.). We also welcome research that studies and promotes emotional resilience of vulnerable, marginalized, and understudied populations (including, but not limited to marginalizations based on gender, race, sexual orientation, age, physical attributes, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic statuses, etc). We encourage research that critiques and discusses ethical practices and provides guidelines for more responsible design and deployment of digital mental health research.

Example topical themes and methods include and are not limited to:

1. Studies on digital mental health that inform policy-making, post-crisis interventions, and/or emotional resilience of individuals and communities before/during/after crises.
2. Studies that inform ethics and privacy concerns with respect to digital mental health support and interventions.
3. Studies on designing, implementing, and/or deploying digital mental health tools, including collaborative and supportive tools, and those that focus on special populations.
4. Studies on digital mental health on understanding how various populations are impacted differently by crises, and towards providing tailored support.
5. Studies on implementing digital mental health support through multi-stakeholder involvement.
6. Studies that aim to improve the accessibility and affordability of mental health care through technology.
7. Works/frameworks that exemplify the integration of ethics in the processes of research design, including but not limited to data collection, analysis, and reporting.
8. Frameworks/empirical works for privacy preservation for modeling/inferring mental health outcomes, keeping in mind at-risk communities.
9. Works that propose/demonstrate open science practices, such as proposing a transparency checklist for studying mental helath from digital data, pre-registering hypotheses, etc.
10. Methodological works on measuring mental health impacts around crises.
11. Methodological contributions (machine learning, passive sensing, ubiquitous computing, eHealth applications, participatory design, mixed methods) to understanding and designing for digital mental health.
12. Empirical and/or theoretical contributions at the intersection of technology and mental health, with a focus on some of the topics mentioned above (crisis, understudied populations, etc.)

Keywords: digital mental health, crisis, digital phenotyping, vulnerable populations, mental health support, ethics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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