Mental health issues are at the forefront of healthcare challenges facing contemporary human society. These issues are most prevalent among working-age people, impacting negatively on the individual, his/her family, workplace, community, and the economy. Conventional mental healthcare services, although highly effective, cannot be scaled up to address the increasing demand from affected individuals, as evidenced in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversational agents, or chatbots, are a recent technological innovation that has been successfully adapted for mental healthcare as a scalable platform of cross-platform smartphone applications that provides first-level support for such individuals. Despite this disposition, mental health chatbots in the extant literature and practice are limited in terms of the therapy provided and the level of personalisation. For instance, most chatbots extend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) into predefined conversational pathways that are generic and ineffective in recurrent use. In this paper, we postulate that Behavioural Activation (BA) therapy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are more effectively materialised in a chatbot setting to provide recurrent emotional support, personalised assistance, and remote mental health monitoring. We present the design and development of our BA-based AI chatbot, followed by its participatory evaluation in a pilot study setting that confirmed its effectiveness in providing support for individuals with mental health issues.

Background: Depot antipsychotic medication is used widely in the treatment and prophylaxis of severe mental illness.Aims: To review the literature on patient and nurse satisfaction with, and attitudes towards, depots.Method: A systematic search of Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL and The Cochrane Library was undertaken, along with citation searches. Studies were selected if satisfaction/attitude data were described in the title or abstract and original data were included. Study quality was rated.Results: The search produced 1374 articles; 22 articles met the inclusion criteria, 18 of which were cross-sectional surveys. Of the 12 studies with relevant data, 10 conveyed a positive opinion of depot medication. Five out of six studies comparing depot with oral medication showed patient preference for depot.Conclusions: High-quality data examining patient and nurse attitudes regarding depot antipsychotics are sparse. What data there are show a positive attitude to depots from patients. Future randomised controlled trials should include satisfaction as an outcome.

Background: There is equivocal evidence of the effectiveness of adherence therapy in improving treatment adherence and clinical outcomes for people with schizophrenia.Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of adherence therapy in improving quality of life for people with schizophrenia.Method: A 52-week, single-blind, multicentre randomised controlled trial of the effectiveness of adherence therapy. Participants were individually randomised to receive eight sessions of adherence therapy or health education. Assessments were undertaken at baseline and at 52-week follow-up.Results: Adherence therapy was no more effective than health education in improving quality of life.Conclusions: This effectiveness trial provides evidence for the lack of effect of adherence therapy in people with schizophrenia with recent clinical instability, treated in ordinary clinical settings.