Tag: video

Reading of the Week: Will the Doctor See You Now? Video vs In-Person Visit Outcomes; Also, Suicide Prevention in India and Barford on Fake Patients

September 24, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Editor

This month, Reading of the Week celebrates its 12th anniversary. Over these past years, the program has grown, establishing partnerships in seven countries and promotional arrangements in three more.  

A quick word of thanks for your ongoing interest.

In March 2020, mental health services were transformed by the reality of the pandemic and the webcam became indispensable. Today, many clinical programs offer a mix of video, in-person, and phone visits. But what are the outcomes?

In a new JAMA Network Open paper, Samantha L. Connolly (of Harvard University) and her co-authors attempt to answer that question. Using Veterans Affairs’ data involving 813 699 participants, they compared different modalities of care and looked at outcomes over a year, including inpatient admissions. “In this comparative effectiveness study, receiving mental healthcare via video was associated with improved clinical outcomes compared with receiving care via phone or in-person.” We consider the paper and its implications.

In the second selection, Rakhi Dandona (of the Public Health Foundation of India) and Dr. Rajesh Sagar (of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences) write about suicide prevention in JAMA Psychiatry. They offer lessons from India, where one in five suicides occur. “If most suicides occur in LMICs, then the future of suicide prevention should increasingly be shaped by evidence generated within them.”

And in the third selection from The Globe and Mail, Pat Barford writes about being a “fake patient,” to use her term. She describes her work as a standardized patient for medical students. “I get to watch the highest level of learning happen in real-time.” 

DG


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Reading of the Week: Helping Healthcare Workers Seek Help; Also, Smoking Cessation for Inpatients & Priebe on Why Patients Should Be Called Patients

May 20, 2021 /

From the Editor

How do we connect with them?

With the worst of the third wave now behind us, we are beginning to look forward. But for some, the problems of the pandemic aren’t fading. They will continue to struggle with mental health problems.

Healthcare workers are particularly at risk. They are also, collectively, a group that is difficult to engage. In the first selection, we look at a new paper from The British Journal of Psychiatry. Dr. Doron Amsalem (of Columbia University) and his co-authors do a video intervention to increase treatment seeking. The resulting RCT is impressive. The authors write: “The high proportion of healthcare workers surveyed in this study who reported symptoms of probable generalised anxiety, depression and/or PTSD emphasises the need for intervention aimed at increasing treatment-seeking among US healthcare workers. A three-minute online social contact-based video intervention effectively increased self-reported treatment-seeking intentions among healthcare workers.”

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In the second selection, Richard A. Brown (of the University of Texas at Austin) and his co-authors look at a new approach to an old problem: high smoking rates among people with severe mental illness. Focusing on inpatient hospitalizations, they design an intervention built on motivational interviewing. We consider their JAMA Psychiatry paper.

Is the term patient antiquated? Should we use other terms, like client or service user? In a BJPsych Bulletin paper, Dr. Stefan Priebe (of Queen Mary University of London) argues that we serve patients – and that words matter. “Mental healthcare is based on shared values and scientific evidence. Both require precise thinking, and precise thinking requires an exact and consistent terminology.”

DG

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