Denny Meyer
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Title: Data Collected Using an Online Mental Health Platform
Biography
Biography: Denny Meyer
Abstract
Anxiety Online was a very successful online platform, created with assistance from the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. This platform was designed to diagnose twenty-one mental health disorders and to provide online treatmentrnfor five anxiety disorders. In addition this platform has provided a database consisting of very valuable mental health data. Thisrndatabase has been used to validate several of the mental health diagnoses provided by the platform, to investigate the factorsrnassociated with attrition and to study the comorbidity patterns found in this online sample. More recently this database hasrnbeen used to build a model to predict the risk of suicide ideation. This model is currently being incorporated in an application specifically designed for the use of General Practitioners. In this address we describe some of the advantages of an online database of this nature, such as its ability to reach patients who do not seek other forms of mental health assistance. In additionrnwe dwell on some of the disadvantages of such a database, such as the low rate of post-treatment assessment and biases in thernsample in terms of age, gender and computer literacy.