Elisaveta Dino1, Nikolina Bode1
1Mental Health Community Center, Korça, Albania.
Aim: Depression is a frequently encountered problem that affects approximately 1 in 5 women and 1 in 10 men throughout their lives. Beside the traditional ways of dealing with this problem, during the last 2 years our mental health center has been implementing an online platform program called“I fight depression”that is used to treat adults and adolescents who suffer from mild or moderate forms of depression.The purpose of this research is to reflect the experience of the mental health community centerof Korça during the implementation of this platform indicating the progress of this new form of treatment, the challenges and the innovations it induces.
Methodology:The study has been conducted by reviewing the literature on this platform as well as by collecting generalimplementation data from the users of this platform based on their progress in accomplishing the CBT based treatment workshops. Eight professionals from the mental health center (psychologists, doctors, social workers and nurses) have been engaged to collect the general implementation data from the patients using the internet based platform.
Results:41% of the individuals who have been registered for the treatment of depression through the online platform do not have enough knowledge on how to use the internet as a form of treatment.Over 60% of the users show a low commitment to perform the workshop sections on their own without professional support as a result of their depressive mood.Difficulties in using the online platform are encountered by individuals based on their socio-cultural level and /or age group, leading to a significant part of the participants giving up on completing this therapy.About 68% of platform users reside in rural areas and 32% of them reside in urban areas, the female population accounts about 65% of the clients versus 35% males.Only 20% of users have been regularly active and have completed the treatment.
Conclusions: This study suggests that “I fight depression” is a platform mostly welcomed by young people of age group 20/30 years old as well as by individuals living in urban areas who have a higher socio-cultural level.This treatment had more positive results on the users that were consistently followed by a mental health professional throughout all the stages of the platform. Difficulties in applying this new treatment were mostly encountered in the rural areas due to a lack of internet accessibility and computers or cellphones.
Keywords: depression, mental health community center,online platform, online therapy challenges.