A director of the digital psychiatry program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston says using chatbots for mental health is an innovative approach to increase access to care. As examples, he cites an app called Karim that counsels Syrian refugee children, Emma helps Dutch speakers with mild anxiety and MindBloom allows users to support and motivate each other. None of the apps is meant to replace traditional therapy. For legal and ethical reasons, the creators can't say their chatbots actually "treat" users because that would imply the practice of medicine. The results of the first trial of a text-based mental health chatbot were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Participants were split into two groups, one whose members "conversed" with Woebot for 20 sessions. The other group was given a National Institute of Mental Health e-book. The results confirmed those in the Woebot group experienced a reduction in depression.
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