Text messaging shows potential as mental health therapy: Study

Text messaging shows potential as mental health therapy: Study

A new study has explored a text-messaging intervention as a potential therapy to mental health issues.

The study states that a text-messaging intervention, on top of normal care, can be a safe, clinically promising, feasible tool to provide support to people with serious mental illness.

For the study, the research team examined the impact of text messaging as an add-on to an assertive community treatment program versus the latter alone.

Through an assertive community treatment program, those with serious mental illness have a designated team that helps them with life skills, such as finding a job and housing, managing medications, as well as providing daily, in-person clinic-based services.

People with serious mental illness are likely though to experience symptoms each day, for which they may need additional therapy.

The results demonstrated that 95 per cent initiated the intervention and texted 69 per cent of possible days with an average of four texts per day.

On average, participants sent roughly 165 or more text messages and received 158 or more messages.

The intervention was found to be safe, as there were zero adverse events reported.