Warm Hands Entangled in Cold Technology? How Psychologists Provide Therapy in Digital Psychiatry

Mental illness is a growing global problem posing constraints on healthcare providers. To remedy this, there is a call for digitalization. Digital psychiatry is supposed to mitigate the problem of long waiting lists, enable healthcare providers to spend more time on each psychiatric patient, and promote personalized treatment. However, critics fear that digital psychiatry reduces treatment quality for the patient and erodes the core professional expertise of healthcare providers. From this perspective, the crisis of psychiatry is due to a lack of the so-called warm hands, which cannot be replaced by cold technology.

This study examines how digital psychiatry affects the professional jurisdiction and expertise of psychologists. I do this by focusing on a Danish case of digital, psychiatric therapy. In Denmark, psychiatry has become a pivotal political issue, and the healthcare sector is highly digitalized in general.

Several scholars have suggested that digitalization challenges the expertise of healthcare providers. Drawing on Eyal, the study examines the extent to which digital technologies challenge the expertise of psychologists or enable new forms of expertise. At the Danish digital therapy initiative, some of the conventional tasks of psychologists are carried out via online programs. On the one hand, this can be interpreted as a form of deskilling. On the other hand, the new stream of interactions between psychologists, patients, and technologies may enable new forms of expertise for psychologists. The study uses a host of different qualitative methods including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus group interviews.

The study shows that digital psychiatry poses challenges for the professional expertise of psychologists, possibly instigating a form of digital fatigue among psychologists. At the same time, digital technologies open new jurisdictional avenues for psychologists suggesting that the cold technology of digital psychiatry is displacing, rather than replacing, the warm hands of healthcare providers.