With the transition to virtual therapy as recommended by CAP, I wanted to investigate the effectiveness of telepsychology. Here is one study I found.
Varker, T., Brand, R. M., Ward, J., Terhaag, S., & Phelps, A. (2019). Efficacy of synchronous telepsychology interventions for people with anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and adjustment disorder: A rapid evidence assessment. Psychological Services, 16(4), 621–635.
From the study and ICEEFT listserve post from Dr. Robert Allen in Denver: “What is the evidence for these modalities of care, is there adequate research to support their use, are they as effective as care as usual? In this rapid evidence assessment, Varker and colleagues review the existing empirical research on the efficacy of telepsychology programs. They only looked at synchronous telepsychology interventions (i.e., those interventions during which therapist and client are interacting in real time), and not asynchronous use of technology (smartphone apps and chat technologies in which therapist and client are not interacting in real time or are not interacting at all). Synchronous telepsychology is most similar to face to face psychotherapy, and likely the option adopted by most therapists during these times. Health care providers initially adopted telepsychology and telehealth to overcome barriers to access to health care and psychotherapy like distance, stigma, and transportation needs. With the global pandemic related to COVID-19, psychotherapists are increasingly using telepsychology to manage physical distancing requirements while providing services.
Varker and colleagues focused their review on randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses, which researchers consider to be the highest level of evidence for an intervention. The authors found 24 studies that evaluated telepsychology interventions with clinical populations of adults who had depression, anxiety, or PTSD. They found good quality evidence for telephone-delivered therapy (11 studies) and video teleconference-delivered interventions (12 studies). That means that the studies of these modalities were high quality and so results were likely reliable. The evidence indicated that both of these modes of delivering psychotherapy were as effective as face-to-face or treatment as usual. The evidence for internet delivered text-based treatments was not of high quality (3 studies). There were too few studies of this modality, and their quality was low. And so, the authors determined that the evidence for text-based therapy was unknown.
Practice Implications
Research on telepsychology interventions is still quite new with a limited number of quality studies attesting to their efficacy. Nevertheless, the findings were promising for telephone delivered psychotherapy and videoconferencing telepsychology, such that psychotherapists can be reasonably confident in using these methods with clients. Text-based delivery of interventions had limited and poor-quality evidence.”
Thus, we can safely use telepsychology as an alternative to in-person sessions during this pandemic.