Dr. Blake F. Dear, Co-Director of the eCentreClinic in Australia, recently visited Karolinska Institutet to partake in the dissertation of Marianne Bonnert. While in Sweden, he also gave a talk on recent updates from the Australian eCentreClinic. They develop internet-delivered psychological treatments for common mental health and physical health conditions.

Internet-delivered treatments in Australia

The eCentreClinic is a clinical research unit at Macquarie University, Sydney, which runs clinical trials to develop and evaluate internet-delivered treatments. If efficacy is observed in these trials, treatments are then implemented at the online MindSpot Clinic.

MindSpot Clinic

The MindSpot Clinic is a national online mental health service in Australia. MindSpot provides assessments, referrals and online treatment. The most common service is an online assessment form, which contains clinical measures of anxiety and depression. After completing the assessment, some individuals continue onto online treatment. Here’s an overview of their results so far (over 10 000 patients):

Recent developments at the eCentreClinic

The researchers at eCentreClinic have recently completed a large effort to compare different formats of internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy (iCBT).

• Clinician-guided iCBT vs Self-guided iCBT
• Trans-diagnostic iCBT vs Disorder-specific iCBT

The randomised trials investigated this four-arm design for generalised anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder.

Their results are somewhat surprising: there were no marked differences in the four treatment arms! This means that, in their trials, self-guided iCBT was as effective as clinician-guided iCBT; and trans-diagnostic iCBT was as effective as disorder-specific iCBT.

The researchers found no marked differences between self-guided iCBT and clinician-guided iCBT

You can find the studies here: GAD, MDD, SAD, PD

Summary

There are many interesting results from the eCentreClinic, and it is encouraging to see a lot of high quality research being done in Australia. Friendly competition will inspire us to work even harder on the difficult issues at hand!

You can download the presentation here: blake-dear-ecentreclinic