A potentially interesting new book on mental health and technology and an example of how mobile phone technology will change mental healthcare

The Use of Technology in Mental Health: Applications, Ethics and Practice
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/the-use-of-technology-in-mental-health-applications-ethics-and-practice/

Technology is changing healthcare. mhealth is a term many won't have
heard. It's mobile phone health technology and projects like SANA Mobile
are doing amazing things to bring healthcare to the third world.
mhmhealth will come about too. The mobile phone is already an important
tool to connect people.

It also offers the chance for regular mood monitoring. I'm sure this is
being experimented with. One of the exciting projects at Rekimoto Labs
is to make a device that measures emotions from the handset. Their
Affectphone system may offer objective and easy measurement of mood.
This could deliver extraordinary new data for mental health research,
treatment and monitoring if it becomes a reliable technology.

http://lab.rekimoto.org/projects/affectphone/

It works on Galvanic Skin Response.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

Initially it was experimented with in mental health as far back as 1906
before the Scientologists 'popularised' the technology.

The University of Kuopio have been experimenting with it to identify
psychosis.
http://it.uku.fi/biosignal/research/gsr.shtml

From the graphs it looks like it's not totally reliable, i.e. there may
be false positives and missed diagnosis, however this is already true of
psychiatric diagnosis in clinical practice. I may be mistaken about my
estimate of reliability though. It's been a while since I've had to
interpret this sort of information.

What society chooses to do with this information is outside the
technology sphere. Psychiatrists may find many more people are
experiencing psychosis than they expected. Many people have an unusual
experience of consciousness yet are never seen by the mental healthcare
system. Hopefully in the future we'll see a move away from antipsychotic
medication to self-management and therapy.

This could lead to some lives being saved. I've recently been emailing
Millie Kieve. She's an amazing woman who's tirelessly campaigned for 15
years after her duaghters tragic suicide because of an adverse reaction
to her medication. Her daughter became psychotic and killed herself. Had
she had a phone which could detect psychosis her life may have been saved.

It could also be used to monitor illict drug use perhaps because I guess
this could change GSR. After all, cannabis users induce a psychosis-like
state though they enjoy it.