Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes
Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their exp...
Autor principal: | |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Netherlands
2020
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7462105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32905100 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09554-y |
_version_ | 1783576853489909760 |
---|---|
author | van Grunsven, Janna |
author_facet | van Grunsven, Janna |
author_sort | van Grunsven, Janna |
collection | PubMed |
description | Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked—hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7462105 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-74621052020-09-02 Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes van Grunsven, Janna Ethics Inf Technol Original Paper Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked—hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. Springer Netherlands 2020-09-01 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC7462105/ /pubmed/32905100 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09554-y Text en © The Author(s) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Original Paper van Grunsven, Janna Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title | Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title_full | Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title_fullStr | Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title_full_unstemmed | Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title_short | Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
title_sort | perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7462105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32905100 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09554-y |
work_keys_str_mv | AT vangrunsvenjanna perceptualbreakdownduringaglobalpandemicintroducingphenomenologicalinsightsfordigitalmentalhealthpurposes |