Digital Psychiatry in Denmark: DIY Treatment?

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 and promote participation and involvement among psychiatric patients. However, critics fear that digital psychiatry is a neoliberal technofix reducing treatment quality.

The paper examines psychiatric patients’ self-help practices when intertwined with digital technologies. The paper focuses on a Danish case of digital, psychiatric therapy. In Denmark, psychiatry has become a pivotal political issue, and the healthcare sector is generally highly digitalized.

Theoretically, the paper synthesizes a Foucauldian understanding of self-technologies with insights from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). In this regard, self-technologies are explored via practices of self-monitorization and, consequently, self-altering behavior. However, ANT helps to emphasize the agency of the technology and displaces focus from the "self" understood in a narrow sense; it illuminates how changing care practices happen in the assemblage of patients and technologies.

Further, the paper examines to what extent mental health digital technologies conjoin lay experience-based knowledge with clinical, expert knowledge. The experience-based knowledge emanates from psychiatric patients’ subjective experiences of e.g., “feeling down” and the clinical, expert knowledge derives from self-monitoring categories in mental health digital technologies, e.g., “negative affective symptoms”. In this way, the article explores what kind of knowledge is produced via the intertwinement between patients and mental health digital technologies. Moreover, it illuminates what kind of expertise patients obtain by engaging in self-helping practices. The paper is empirically rooted in interviews with psychiatric patients and ethnographic observations providing an in-depth understanding of the patients’ understanding of their own expertise and their relation to digital technologies and healthcare providers.