Chapter 14.Internet-Based Brief Therapies

With the advent of modern information technology, new opportunities have emerged for brief therapies. Since the late 1990s, a variety of Internet-based psychological treatments have been developed and tested in randomized controlled trials (Andersson et al. 2016). Growth in Internet-based interventions has been extremely rapid, with a large evidence base for a range of medical conditions and psychosocial problems (Andersson 2016). Partly because of this explosive growth, this has been a fragmented subdiscipline because terminology is scattered and inconsistent. For example, terms such as Web-based psychotherapy, online therapy, digital interventions, and e-therapy are used inconsistently and interchangeably, making it difficult to get a grasp of the field (Barak et al. 2009). In this chapter we will refer to Internet-based therapy as a delivery format for psychotherapy in which online resources form the basis of the intervention. We thus distinguish between Internet-based therapy and telepsychiatry (see Chapter 13, “Telepsychiatry”). Whereas telepsychiatry is face-to-face therapy conducted online, Internet-based therapy is the guided use of Web-based resources such as manuals for self-directed treatment.