The new tech treatments that could improve mental health

From video games to personal avatars, researchers are looking to develop a new generation of digital tools that do not involve taking a drug or therapy.

- Michael Peel

Irene Jimenez Padilla used to suffer persistent traumatic flashbacks from her time as a nurse during the Covid-19 pandemic. Then a cult computer puzzle game changed everything. She found the disturbing recollections impossible to control until she signed up for a pioneering therapy based on Tetris. After a few weeks playing the game, which involves rotating variously shaped coloured blocks so they fit together, the change was dramatic. She still remembered the Covid-era events, but no longer constantly relived them in a way that caused her acute distress.

"It was so effective," she says of the digital balm the Tetris delivered. "All those faces, all those noises - they are gone."

The Tetris method is part of an emerging frontier of mental health treatments using new technologies that are offering promising early results and possibilities.

Motivated in part by the limitations of existing treatments - mostly involving drugs or talk therapy with a psychologist - many researchers are looking to develop digital tools to treat mental health.

Miranda Wolpert, director of mental health at Wellcome, the charitable foundation, says the new generation of techniques promises to be more targeted, more scalable and potentially transformative for patients.

"We're now at a tipping point," Professor Wolpert says. "The sort of mental health intervention you see in five years may look nothing like - or very different from - the ones that you see now."

Like other cutting-edge solutions to tricky health problems, these technologies are now at varying stages of earning acceptance from regulators, clinicians and - most crucially - patients. In many cases, much larger studies will be needed to prove their effectiveness and value for money.