A virtual mental health community - A future scenario

Abstract

It is the year 2030. National mental health policies have come and gone but mental health problems remain a major challenge in the community. The retirement of ageing mental health professionals has left in its wake a serious workforce shortage. As predicted by 20th century futurologists (Ferguson, 2007), there has been an increasing trend towards the transition of mental healthcare control from professionals to consumers. Consumers have access to personal health budgets, which enable them to control how they purchase healthcare support and governments across the world have formed a consortium to fund a single e-mental health platform. Technology developments have enabled the collection of personal data in patient-controlled records, populated by information collected by means of wearable biosensors, implanted microchips and manually entered data. Gone are the clunky prototype health robots of 2013 and in their place are wearable or miniature implanted personal coaches which receive data wirelessly and transmit guidance via invisible wireless earphones and optical devices. Prototype neural implants including brain computer interfaces (Hampson et al., 2012; Mattout, 2012), enabling synthetic telepathy and automated relapse prediction, have become a reality for some (Warwick, 2012). Disenchanted consumers have long since deserted the Australian government’s e-mental health portal established in 2012. (First paragraph).