Home United States USA — IT How smart home tech could help schizophrenics cope

How smart home tech could help schizophrenics cope

255
0
SHARE

With the right combination of emerging technology, schizophrenia treatment could be on the brink of a major shift.
An old computer lies cracked open on a table.
I was sitting in an office in the back of the Centerstone mental health treatment facility in Louisville, Kentucky. Beside me were an old PC tower and a laptop, both cracked open, wires unspooled and hard drives lying under the flickering ceiling fluorescents like animal innards in a high school biology class.
Two men sat across from me: Lon Moore, a Centerstone client with schizoaffective disorder, and his peer support specialist, Dante Murray, a leader in the local mental health community, who also lives with schizophrenia. To both of them, this mess of circuitry and gadgetry had been instrumental to their recovery.
Dante teaches clients with mental illness basic computer literacy, which sparked Lon’s passion for tinkering — hence the deconstructed PCs. For Lon, despite battling paranoia that conventional wisdom says technology might trigger, designing basic gadgets has become therapeutic.
Personally, Dante has found the most helpful device in his recovery to be a smartwatch, which monitors his vitals, tracking sleep and exercise.
Dante Murray has been in recovery from schizophrenia for over 10 years. Since his first psychotic break, he’s gone on to become the vice president of the Louisville chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Dante’s and Lon’s gravitation toward technology after diagnosis isn’t peculiar. In 2014, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) commissioned a survey of 457 schizophrenic adults. The poll asked them a series of questions about how their condition intersected with their use of technology. Nearly three in five respondents said they used technology to cope with their symptoms, drowning out voices with headphones, for instance. About two in three said they anticipated technology would become a bigger part of their recovery in the coming years.
That level of comfort with technology suggests more can be done. Mental health experts say harnessing tech’s benefits could lead to powerful results in helping people live more-normal lives. If nothing else, tech could be a strong supplement for the treatment of mental illness.
“I’d like to see something more holistic,” Dante said, painting a picture of phones, wearables and smart home tech all working together to predict and prevent psychotic episodes.
Turns out, we’re not necessarily so far from that reality.
“For a long time there was this notion of a digital divide,” said Dr. John Torous, the co-director of the Digital Psychiatry Program at the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. People assumed “that patients with a serious mental illness either did not own technology like smartphones or tablets, or if they did, they wouldn’t want to use them, because it would make them upset, paranoid or afraid. ”
Lon Moore, who continually struggles with paranoia, says working with technology has only been a positive experience.
NAMI’s survey undermined this theory, said Torous, and it was just the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading...