Imagine you’ve been struggling with depression, but your job doesn’t give you enough time off to regularly see a Therapist or Psychiatrist. You have 3 kids, and they take up all of your time outside of work. How would you cope? Would you binge and purge on food? Become an insomniac? Rely on substances to get yourself through the week knowing they do more harm than good? I’m sure everyone has an idea in their head of how they would specifically cope. What if I told you there was a way to get the treatment you need without having to take excessive time off and away from the things that matter most to you? That’s where my research and purpose came in over the course of JanTerm, which I spent interning at Northside Hospital Behavioral Health Services.
Walking into the Northside Hospital Behavioral Health Services outpatient clinic, I wasn’t quite sure what my focus was going to be. I didn’t know how I could truly make an impact. Since I knew that I couldn’t see patients because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it seemed like the best choice was research. When I sat down with my mentor on my first day, she talked to me about how she had learned about FDA-approved mental health treatment apps in 2024, which she thought would be interesting to research. With that, I immediately got to work. I scoured the internet for everything I could find about these apps. By speaking with professionals in Perinatal Psychiatry, Psych-Oncology, and even Drama Therapy, I gained a more well-rounded perspective of the clinic. Once the last day of my internship came, I was ready. Much like for JanTerm, I had a final presentation, but this was different. As I stood in front of a room of over 20 Behavioral Health Specialists, I educated them about how these apps would give patients better options and accessibility to care and hoped they would consider using them in the clinic. Their reception was so great that my mentor decided that I should work with the whole hospital. For the next few weeks, I’ll be presenting across the state of Georgia to all 5 campuses of Northside Hospital so these apps can give treatment to the over 5.5 million people that they see each year. This year’s JanTerm was the most rewarding one yet, and its impact will only grow as these apps reach more patients.
