Agents of change: Understanding the therapeutic processes associated with the helpfulness of therapy for mental health problems with relational agent MYLO

Abstract

Objective: To understand the therapeutic processes associated with the helpfulness of an online relational agent intervention, Manage Your Life Online (MYLO).Methods: Fifteen participants experiencing a mental health related problem used Manage Your Life Online for 2 weeks. At follow-up, the participants each identified two helpful and two unhelpful questions posed by Manage Your Life Online within a single intervention session. Qualitative interviews were conducted and analyzed using thematic and content analysis to gain insight into the process of therapy with Manage Your Life Online.Results: MYLO appeared acceptable to participants with a range of presenting problems. Questions enabling free expression, increased awareness, and new insights were key to a helpful intervention. The findings were consistent with the core processes of therapeutic change, according to Perceptual Control Theory, a unifying theory of psychological distress. Questions that elicited intense emotions, were repetitive, confusing, or inappropriate were identified as unhelpful and were associated with disengagement or loss of faith in Manage Your Life Online. Conclusions:The findings provide insight into the likely core therapy processes experienced as helpful or hindering and outlines further ways to optimize acceptability of Manage Your Life Online.

A Mobile Application-Based Relational Agent as a Health Professional for COVID-19 Patients: Design, Approach, and Implications

“…That is, the HCPs suggested incorporating peers and professional services within the RA to support the mental well-being of patients. While earlier work such as Gaffeney et al [ 44 ] recommend delivering cognitive therapy to PTSD patients using textual interactions without help from the HCPs. The overall goal of the target RA is to act as a replacement for HCPs and, possibly, peers.…”

“…Gaffeney et al [ 44 ] designed a web-based platform named ‘MYLO’ for cognitive therapy. MYLO employed textual conversations without any assistance from any HCPs.…”

Manage Your Life Online ('MYLO'): Co-design and case-series of an artificial therapist to support youth mental health.

“…A universal approach could lead to increased user engagement and treatment efficacy by reducing the burden on users who have multiple or over-lapping comorbidities by removing the need to use multiple apps. Furthermore, universal interventions, both traditional and digital, have been shown to have similar effects on outcomes as their disorder-specific counterparts [21], yet are more flexible and scalable [22].…”

“…For the next stage in development, a MYLO prototype was provided for two weeks to a community sample of adults with self-reported diagnoses of anxiety or depression [22].…”

“…Although participants have generally found MYLO to be an acceptable intervention, MYLO faces similar challenges to other chatbots, namely ensuring content is appropriate and not repetitive [22]. To address these challenges, and improve MYLO, participants from earlier studies made several suggestions for improving the MYLO interface, including modernising it, using a more traditional messaging app layout, and providing crisis contact information, and for increasing the diversity and number of questions.…”