Digital technologies for mental health improvements in the COVID-19 pandemic: a scoping review

Digital technologies have been used to support mental health services for two decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic created a particular opportunity for greater utilization and more data-driven assessment of these digital technologies. This research aims to offer a scoping review of the characteristics and effectiveness of digital interventions that were employed to improve mental health in the real context of COVID-19 pandemic. A combination of search terms was applied for automatic search of publications in the relevant databases. The key features of included studies were extracted, including the intervention, participant, and study details. A total of 20 eligible studies were included in the final review, which were conducted across different geographic regions and among diverse cultural groups. Among them, fourteen studies mainly reported the impact of digital technologies on general population, while only one published study developed specific interventions for the isolated COVID-19 depressed patients in hospitals. Digital technologies identified in this review were mainly developed via web-based and mobile-based platforms, such as social networking and video conferencing applications. But less than half of them were aligned with theoretical approaches from standardized psychological treatments. Most of the studies have reported positive effects of digital technologies, either on improving general mental and emotional well-being or addressing specific conditions (e.g., depression, stress, and anxiety). This scoping review suggests that digital technologies hold promise in bridging the mental health-care gap during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and calls for more rigorous studies to identify pertinent features that are likely to achieve more effective mental health outcomes.