Promoting meaningful recovery with digital mental health care

There is growing interest in digital mental health as well as accumulating evidence of the potential for technology-based tools to augment traditional mental health services and to potentially overcome barriers to access and use of mental health services. Our research group has examined how people with mental illnesses think about and make use of technology in their everyday lives as a means to provide insight into the emerging paradigm of digital mental health. This research has been guided by anthropological approaches that emphasise lived experience and underscore the complexity of psychiatric recovery. In this commentary I describe how an anthropological approach has motivated us to ask how digital technology can be leveraged to promote meaningful recovery for people with mental illnesses and to develop a new approach to the integration of technology-based tools for people with mental illnesses.