Support for Carers of Young People with Mental Illness: Design and Trial of a Technology-Mediated Therapy

Abstract

In this article, we show how a technology-mediated mental health therapy involving psycho-education, therapist moderators, and social networking can provide support for carers of young people with mental illness. This multi-faceted tool provides opportunities for users to adapt the system to their needs, leading us to refocus the goal of treatment adherence toward a relatively new phenomenon in HCI, concordance, which has not previously been examined in the HCI literature in relation to online mental-health tools. Concordance shares important links with the development of therapeutic alliance, which is centrally important to mental health therapy, and to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), whic..