Abstract

Given the surge in demand for mental health care and the huge gap in meeting this need, the idea of using technology-based psychotherapy and psychological services of telepsychology or automated expert systems for different sets of people during an epidemic or pandemic period is pivotal to the practice of mental health professionals, especially clinical psychologists. Stopping or reducing face-to-face psychological intervention because of the risks involved to the clients and clinicians during the pandemic outbreak can be handled by digital mental health facilities. Mental health care during the pandemic is essential because the individual and group panic about the possibility of being infected has serious implications for the mental health status of people. In a similar view, those that have psychological disorders co-occurring with infectious diseases are in high need of psychological intervention, while for some individuals, psychological disorders might have been present before they contacted the infectious diseases, whereas some might be infected with the disease before the onset of psychological disorders. The need to care for the mental health of infected populations and that of medical personnel and volunteers attending to infected populations can be attended to by applying evidence-based psychotherapy and psychological services through telepsychology/behavioural telehealth and automated expert system which have been established to be efficacious in treating mental distress conditions. Going digital with mental health care require urgent up scaling of skill sets and capacity of mental health care professionals to develop applications and to deliver services using digital facilities especially for African countries.

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