researchers found that in cases of moderate anxiety or depression an online treatment tool has proven surprisingly effective it's called internet delivered CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy a type of online program to help patients identify and deal with their illness Dr Danielle Martin joins us now now this tool has been around for a while at least decade or so so what's the big deal now well what these researchers did was that they looked at all of the evidence all of the studies that have been done over the period of a decade and what they found was
that actually this online CBT has been has shown to be actually very effective uh for people with anxiety depression and a few other um mental health concerns I think what this this uh review of the evidence does is hopefully gives us confidence to try to scale up available internet-based models to improve access to Mental Health Services for Canadians if you think about people living in rural communities think about our Multicultural communities where um access to therapy in your own life language can be a big issue you think about the many Canadians who don't have insurance
to cover a psychologist or a social worker delivering this kind of therapy to them um improving access to internet-based therapy like this could really make a difference so how does this tool fit in with the other different options that are available well you know 60% of people with a mental health concern in Canada don't ever even go in to seek help and a big reason behind that is stigma so having Internet available internet-based tools available to people can help to kind of break the ice I think for a lot of people who are experiencing particularly
mild or moderate forms of depression or anxiety um for those people who do seek help whether it's in a family doctor's office like mine or somewhere else in the system we can integrate those tools with other forms of therapy that are available so whether that's supportive Counseling in a physician's office or a counselor's office whether it's uh medication um all of those things can be uh integrated alongside the kind of uh what we call facilitated self-help that people are doing when they're online just as we used to do with a book or a workbook we
can now do that online in ways that are probably more effective all right Danielle thanks very much thank you
