Information Technologies in Mental Medicine: A Scoping Review

Background. According to the World Health Organization, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of anxiety disorders and depression in the world increased by 25% (World Health Organization, 2022). This circumstance required an urgent response from the world psychological community and led to the massive use of information technologies in mental medicine (Sverdlov & Ryeznik, 2022) Purpose. This review is aimed at studying various information technologies used in mental medicine. The review describes various information systems for collecting and processing data, identifying diseases and providing assistance to people suffering from them. This is the first review in which an attempt is made to cover the field of application in medicine quite widely. He tries to answer questions related to the prevalence of old technologies and the emergence of new ones, related to the problems of people using these technologies, as well as to find out how technologies have changed. Materials and Methods. This review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR recommendations for the search and selection of studies. The search was conducted in the popular scientific database Scopus. Results. This review includes 102 studies from 268 search results. The most common use of information technology in mental medicine has been various applications for phones, as well as applications in chatbots and data analysis. Most studies were published in the US (16 articles), followed by Australia (12 articles) and England and Canada (8 articles each). The included studies have shown that information technology can help in the detection and prevention of mental disorders. However, additional efforts are needed to introduce and use information technologies in mental medicine. Conclusion. In this scoping review, we included 102 studies that reported on the use of information technology in psychiatric medicine. Studies have shown that information technologies have great potential for solving the problem of processing and collecting research data in psychiatric medicine. Models trained to diagnose and assist in various psychological illnesses. This review also identified key limitations of the potential transformation of information technology-based methods in clinical application.