ABSTRACT
Individuals and families increasingly turn to e-mental health apps for education, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health disorders and to promote mental wellness. These apps provide significant increases in convenience from existing services, since they can augment or replace services with on-demand access within the home. This raises important questions about self-selection of interventions. Who uses these applications? How do individuals perceive their own progress within applications? This study is a retrospective data analysis-based evaluation of a commercially available e-mental health program that includes biofeedback video games that help children build emotion regulation skills by demonstrating and prompting children to practice bodily focused emotion regulation techniques. The e-mental health program also provided parent psychoeducation-focused coaching at the time of the evaluation. Data collection instruments used to inform the retrospective study included parent intake surveys, gameplay engagement data, and notes from parent coaching calls. The evaluation revealed families presenting for common symptoms associated with emotion regulation deficits, as opposed to a wellness cohort looking for additional support. Families near-universally activated and engaged with the intervention, willing to carry out an extended "dose" of the e-mental health program in their home. Parents self-reported their perceptions of their children's emotion regulation progress, primarily in terms of children's increased use of emotion regulation skills, improved emotion awareness and communication, calmer demeanor, greater confidence, and improved relationships. More work is needed to understand the corresponding clinical progress from this in-home training, as well as its implications for how emotion regulation skills grow.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Older patients with bipolar disorder (BD) present with variable degrees of cognitive impairment. Over time, stress, mood episodes, and comorbidities increase the body's allostatic load. We assessed the extent to which allostatic load vs more traditional measures of medical burden account for the heterogeneity in cognition in this population. METHODS: Thirty-five older euthymic patients with BD and 30 age-equated, gender-equated, and education-equated comparison participants were administered a comprehensive assessment including a neuropsychological battery, and 9 physiological measures to determine allostatic load. The relationship among allostatic load, medical burden, and cognition was assessed. RESULTS: Compared with the mentally healthy comparators, patients were impaired globally, and in 4 cognitive domains-information-processing speed / executive functioning, delayed memory, language, and visuomotor ability, and presented with greater medical burden but not a different allostatic load. Allostatic load, but not medical burden, was associated with delayed memory performance both in a correlational analysis and in a multivariate regression analysis. CONCLUSION: Euthymic older patients with BD are impaired on several cognitive domains and have high medical burden. Their memory performance is more strongly associated with allostatic load than with traditional measures of medical burden. These findings need to be replicated and extended longitudinally.
