DeePsy is an application that allows psychotherapists to continuously monitor the process and outcomes of psychotherapy. It gives psychotherapists a more thorough and systematic feedback on their work and thus the possibility to better adapt the therapy to your needs.
No, your therapist will take care of everything. You just answer short questionnaires that you receive by email (or you fill them in together with your therapist in the session). Clients do not create an account in the app themselves.
Measurement is important for two reasons. First, it provides therapists with important feedback about the progress of your therapy. Even therapists are just human beings. Sometimes they may miss signals that your therapy is not going as expected or that you need to "change course." Data from DeePsy can help them significantly in this regard.
Second, although the effectiveness of psychotherapy has been demonstrated many times, scientific understanding of exactly how psychotherapy works is still limited. We need a better understanding of how people achieve change in therapy, what a person specifically needs at a particular stage of therapy, and what may be hindering the change. To do this, we need real data from therapeutic practice.
Research studies show that systematically obtaining feedback from clients slightly increases the effect of psychotherapy, reduces the risk of premature termination and also reduces the risk of deterioration during psychotherapy. DeePsy is a tool that you can use to regularly inform your therapist about how you are doing and how you respond to each session.
Working with DeePsy is simple. Your therapist will ask you to fill out a series of questionnaires that focus primarily on your current mental state, expectations of therapy, and perceptions of the therapeutic process. The questionnaires are completed online. Some may be filled out directly in your therapist's office, others will will be filled out using a link that you receive in your email inbox. In addition to completing the questionnaire at the beginning and end of the entire therapy (10-15 minutes), the therapist will usually ask you to complete a short questionnaire at the beginning and end of each session (2 minutes).
(Some therapists also use automated processing of session audio recordings. This is an experimental feature of the application that is currently available only to a limited number of therapists. In this case, the therapist will first explain everything to you in detail and ask for your consent. We do not use this feature in cooperation with health insurance companies.)
Therapists may differ in the way they work with questionnaires. For example, some ask their clients to complete the questionnaire outside of the session, while others work with the questionnaires within the session. They may also differ in how thoroughly they discuss their responses with clients. As the authors of DeePsy, we are aware that no questionnaire can fully capture the complexity of your unique experience. While questionnaires are a useful tool, therapists take into account a variety of other information in their work.
Of course you can. The therapist need your consent to obtain and store your data in DeePsy. You can provide your consent by using the link you will receive in via email. Before you decide to give or refuse consent, you will have the opportunity to read the app's terms and conditions in detail. You can also withdraw your consent at any later time using the following link: withdraw consent.
The General Health Insurance Company's program entitled Increasing Access to Psychosocial Support involves evaluating the effectiveness of the care provided. For this purpose, therapists use the DeePsy application, which enables continuous monitoring of the process and results of therapy. The operators of the DeePsy application regularly produce a summary report on the effectiveness of the program (no individual and identifiable data is passed on to the health insurance company). Information on the processing and protection of personal data within the DeePsy application can be found here.