Originally published in 1988, this was the first book to examine the development, application and evaluation of computer counselling and psychotherapy. Integrating concepts of artificial intelligence and psychotherapy, this book provided extensive research data that compared the human therapist to the computer therapist at the time. This title was intended for researchers, professionals, and students of psychotherapy and artificial intelligence. By exploring the automation of therapy and the design of empathetic software this book challenges counsellors and computer scientists to look at what may have been the most fascinating topic to arise in their fields for years to come.

Hands-on Help is a narrative review of the mushrooming field of computer-aided psychotherapy for mental health problems as a whole, from the time it began in the 1960’s through to the present day. The many types of computer-aided psychotherapy and how each might be accessed are detailed together with the pros and cons of such help and the functions it can serve. The authors review prevention as well as treatment. The book describes and summarizes 97 computer-aided self-help systems in 175 studies according to the types of problem they aim to alleviate. These include phobic, panic, obsessive-compulsive and post-traumatic disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual problems, smoking, alcohol and drug misuse, schizophrenia, insomnia, pain and tinnitus distress, and childhood problems such as encopresis, autism and asthma. Within each type of problem the systems are described according to whether they are used on the internet, CD-ROM, phone, handheld or other device. The final chapter shows how internet self-help systems with phone or email support allow clinics to become more virtual than physical. It also discusses methods of screening suitability and of supporting users, constraints to delivery, uptake and completion, cost-effectiveness, and the place of computer-aided self-help in healthcare provision. This informative book will be essential reading for psychiatrists, psychologists and all other mental health professionals interested in broadening their understanding of computer-aided psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis and information science are two disciplines that twenty years ago hardly anyone would have considered closely related with re gard either to persons or subject matter. The cooperation between the two fields was made possible, on the one hand, by the development of information science from a technological discipline to a theoretically founded scientific discipline, and on the other, by the development of psychoanalysis from a hermetically closed special discipline to an open and empirical science. This study reports the successful inclusion of information science as an instrument of research on the psychoanalytic process. This direction of work was initiated by Donald Spence and Hartvig Dahl from the Re search Institute of Mental Health, New York, at the end of the 1960s. H. Thom~, H. K~che1e, and their research group in Ulm must be credited with having adopted Spence's programs as early as 1974; at that time the programs even had to be implemented far away on the IBM computer at the University of Heidelberg. The efforts to expand computer-aided con tent analysis to a method for process research led in 1975 to the ac quisition of the Hamburg program for Electronic Verbal Analysis (EVA). In the following years the author of this study revised, extended, and supplemented the EVA to create the U1m version. This book now describes another step in the integration of information technology in fundamen tal research in psychoanalysis.

Increasingly more computer applications are becoming available to assist mental health clinicians and administrators in patient evaluation and treatment and mental health management, education, and research. Topics covered include: automated assessment procedures; MR-E (The Mental Retardation Expert); computerized assessment system for psychotherapy evaluation and research; computer assisted therapy of stress related conditions; computerized patient evaluation in a clinical setting; computerized treatment planning; the VA national mental health database; networks; managed care; DSM-IV diagnosis; quality management; cost control; knowledge coupling; telemedicine; the clinical library assistant; and monitoring independent service providers.

Increased worldwide mobility and easy access to technology means that the use of technological mediation for treatment is being adopted rapidly and uncritically by psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Despite claims of functional equivalence between mediated and co-present treatments, there is scant research evidence to advance these assertions. Can an effective therapeutic process occur without physical co-presence? What happens to screen-bound treatment when, as a patient said, there is no potential to "kiss or kick?" Our most intimate relationships, including that of analyst and patient, rely on a significant implicit non-verbal component carrying equal or possibly more weight than the explicit verbal component. How is this finely-nuanced interchange affected by technologically-mediated communication? This book draws on the fields of neuroscience, communication studies, infant observation, cognitive science and human/computer interaction to explore these questions. It finds common ground where these disparate disciplines intersect with psychoanalysis in their definitions of a sense of presence, upon which the sense of self and the experience of the other depends.