The digital therapeutic Alliance: prospects and considerations
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
The growing prevalence of digital approaches to mental health care raises a range of questions and considerations. A notion that has recently emerged is that of the digital therapeutic alliance, prompting consideration of whether and how the concept of therapeutic alliance, which has proven to be a central ingredient of successful traditional psychotherapy, could translate to mental health care via digital technologies. This special issue editorial article outlines the topic of digital therapeutic alliance and introduces the five articles that comprise the special issue.
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At least two psychometric tools have been proposed to measure the digital therapeutic alliance: mARM and D-WAI.
“To date, at least two psychometric tools have been proposed to conceptualize and measure this aspect of interacting with chatbots (103): Mobile Agnew Relationship Measure (mARM) (104) and Digital Working Alliance Inventory (D-WAI) (105, 106).”
From Waiting for a digital therapist: three challenges on the path to psychotherapy delivered by artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as [103]
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References 20 · Cited by 56
- Authors
- Lederman, R., & D'Alfonso, S.
- Affiliations
- The University of Melbourne (AU)
- Venue
- JMIR Mental Health
- Publisher
- JMIR Publications Inc.
- Published
- 2021-07-20
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- e31385
- ISSN
- 2368-7959 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8335609
- OpenAlex
- W3184124850
- Cited by
- 56
- References
- 20
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 4
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- JMIR Mental Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Minerva Access (University of Melbourne) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Telemedicine and Telehealth Implementation
- Keywords
- therapeutic relationship, digital mental health, digital psychotherapy, digital health technologies, psychotherapy
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