Funding Source
National Institute of Health Common Fund, 1DP5OD039510
Project Period
8/11/25-7/31/30
Principal Investigator
Emily K. Presseller, PhD (Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth)
Other Project Staff
Falzah Farooq, BS
Project Summary
The US faces a mental health crisis; nearly 83 million Americans experience mental health concerns, but fewer than 50% of these individuals accessed past year mental health services. The workforce of trained and licensed mental health treatment providers is inadequate to address the need for mental health services in the US. There is a critical need for accessible, scalable, and effective mental health interventions. Standalone digital tools offer promise for improving clinical outcomes at scale, but these tools have historically not been personalized to the individuals using them.
The present study seeks to improve the effectiveness of precision psychiatry digital health interventions by developing real-world, person-specific maintenance models for mental health symptoms using data collected in participants’ daily lives. This information will be used to understand what factors specifically impact an individual’s mental health over time. When individuals are at risk for mental health symptoms based on their current circumstances (e.g., mood, thinking patterns, previous behaviors, and environment), the digital tool will deliver in-the-moment prompts to support the individual in using a therapeutic skill that has the potential to improve mental health symptoms. This study will help us to understand how well we can forecast an individual’s mental health symptoms in the future based on data collected from their daily life. The study will also provide insight into which therapeutic skills have the greatest impact on mental health symptoms under specific circumstances.
The study will develop a digital tool for eating disorders specifically, but these methods might have applications in other domains of mental health in the future. The study will enroll 170 adults with eating disorders who will complete 16 weeks of daily data collection and receive interventions prompting them to use cognitive-behavioral therapy skills at times of elevated risk for eating disorder behaviors for 10 weeks.
Public Health Relevance
There is an urgent need to develop effective and highly disseminable digital interventions to address the current mental health crisis in America. This project will evaluate several strategies for developing effective, personalized standalone digital tools for mental health. By evaluating these strategies, we aim to develop a precision psychiatry tool that provides the right type of support at the right time for individuals who use it.