This page won’t tell you whether to use technology in your practice. That decision’s been made for you already, by clients who show up already using apps, and by insurers and employers who increasingly expect some digital component. What it can do is point you to the right book for the specific question you actually have.
These ten books split roughly into three kinds of usefulness: broad general guides, psychoanalytic and historical perspectives on what digital technology does to the mind and to treatment, and how technology gets managed at the level of data and organizational policy.
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Technology and Mental Health: A Clinician’s Guide to Improving Outcomes
Edited by Greg M. Reger, Routledge, 2021
This is a broad, multi-contributor reference covering technology’s role across a wide range of clinical populations and use cases. It includes chapters on apps and telemental health, older adults’ use of mobile and at-home health technologies, and technology specifically for suicide prevention. It also has an early chapter on improving outcomes with artificial intelligence, well before AI became its own dedicated category of clinical literature. It ends with a chapter on shared immersive environments and virtual worlds – territory most other books in this niche don’t reach.
Recommended as the broadest general reference on this page. Start here if you want one book covering the widest range of populations and technologies, then go to a more specific title below for depth on a particular use case.
Technology in Mental Health: Foundations of Clinical Use
Jessica Stone, Routledge Focus, 2022
This one is short by design: 144 pages, and part of Routledge’s “Focus” series of brief single-topic books. It’s less a survey of specific tools than an attempt to address clinician hesitancy directly. Chapters like “The Slow-to-Warm Approach” and the closing “Fear Less” aren’t just decorative titles. The book is explicitly written to walk a reluctant or anxious clinician through why technology adoption feels destabilizing, before it gets to the practical mechanics in later chapters on hardware, software, and case examples.
Recommended for a clinician who wants to understand their own reluctance around technology, not just be handed a list of tools to adopt.
Integrating Technology into Modern Therapies: A Clinician’s Guide to Developments and Interventions
Edited by Jessica Stone, Routledge, 2019
This book looks at how specific technologies get used with specific conditions and populations. Chapters cover therapeutic texting, virtual reality, tablet apps, and online games applied specifically to trauma, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and speech-language concerns. It also has dedicated material on using technology with hospital patients and with migrant, refugee, and homeless populations.
It’s also the one book here explicitly written for more than psychotherapists alone. The publisher pitches it directly to speech-language pathologists and child life specialists as well as mental health clinician.
Recommended for the population and condition-specific chapters specifically. Reach for this one when Reger’s broader guide above doesn’t go far enough for your specific client.
Using Technology in Mental Health Practice
Edited by Jeffrey J. Magnavita, American Psychological Association, 2018
This guide is written explicitly for practitioners who already use technology and want to build a practice – even a business – around it. It opens with a chapter on managing legal, ethical, and practice-standard risk before getting into specific technologies. The book then moves through telemental health delivery, mental health apps, virtual reality psychotherapy, and a cluster of device-based treatments (cranial electrotherapy stimulation, neurofeedback, heart rate variability biofeedback.) Those treatments aren’t featured anywhere else on this page.
Worth noting: Magnavita admits in the book that specific tools covered are likely to age out given how fast technology moves. However, the three-part structure (access to care, treatment, professional development) is designed to outlast that, even where individual chapters won’t.
Best suited to a therapist who’s already comfortable with technology and wants to expand what it can do for their practice.
Hands-on Help: Computer-aided Psychotherapy
Isaac M. Marks, Kate Cavanagh, and Lina Gega, Maudsley Monographs No. 49, Psychology Press/Routledge, 2007
This is a systematic historical survey of computer-aided psychotherapy, covering nearly a hundred systems and the research behind each one. The authors describe and summarize 97 computer-aided self-help systems across 175 studies, tracing the field back to 1965, when researcher Warner Slack programmed the first computer to interview a patient. Systems are organized by the problem they target, such as phobias, OCD and PTSD, depression, eating problems, substance misuse and schizophrenia. Within each, they’re further organized by delivery method: internet, CD-ROM, phone, or handheld device.
Read it the way you’d read an old field guide: not for the specific gear, but for how the terrain got mapped in the first place. The disorder-by-disorder structure it introduced is still a useful way to organize this kind of material.
Psychoanalysis Online: Mental Health, Teletherapy, and Training
Edited by Jill Savege Scharff, Karnac, 2013
What happens to the analytic setting when the shared physical room disappears? This book gathers an international group of psychoanalysts to answer that question, each drawing on their own experience with teleanalysis – treatment conducted by phone, VoIP, or video-teleconference. Contributors work through both the ethical questions this raises and the evidence for whether teleanalysis actually works. The book’s own position is direct: teleanalysis isn’t a lesser version of in-person treatment, it’s a different setting with its own dynamics that need to be understood on their own terms.
This is Volume 1 of what became a four-volume series, all published years before COVID-19 made remote therapy unavoidable. That timing matters; this is a serious, sustained psychoanalytic treatment of teleanalysis written when most of the field still considered it a fringe accommodation rather than a real clinical setting.
If this volume’s questions interest you, later volumes in the series go further into the evidence than this founding volume does. Volume 4 in particular brings a more systematic qualitative research lens to whether teleanalysis is actually effective.
The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media
Alessandra Lemma, Routledge, 2017
This book starts from a different premise: technology shapes a patient’s mind whether or not their therapy happens to involve a screen. Lemma is interested in what constant digital mediation is doing to us, independent of how treatment gets delivered.
The book runs in two movements. “Outside in” is a philosophical look at how technology shapes development, particularly through adolescence and the “black mirror” of a screen that projects an image back at its viewer rather than simply reflecting one. “Inside out” takes on the risks of living constantly connected and disembodied, arguing for a deliberate middle ground with digital tools.
Recommended for a clinician who wants the theoretical grounding for how digital life shapes a patient’s inner world, whether or not that patient’s treatment is delivered online,
Digital Mental Health: A Practitioner’s Guide
Edited by Ives Cavalcante Passos, Francisco Diego Rabelo-da-Ponte, and Flavio Kapczinski, Springer, 2023
This book asks an uncomfortable question: what if what a patient tells you in session is less reliable than what their phone already knows? Its core argument is that continuous data from a sensor or app is often more accurate than what a patient recalls in a single appointment, since memory is prone to bias in a way passive data collection isn’t. The book stops short of calling this a clear win, though. Confidentiality, patient engagement, and retention are treated as genuine limitations, not afterthoughts.
The 15 chapters lean into data science rather than clinical technique. Specific topics include predicting suicide risk using machine learning and big data, and gaming disorder alongside problematic social media use. The expected material on apps, wearable sensors, chatbots, and telepsychiatry is there too.
Best for readers who want the data on whether these tools actually hold up, not a guide to putting them into practice.
Mental Health Practice in a Digital World: A Clinician’s Guide
Edited by Naakesh A. Dewan, John S. Luo, and Nancy M. Lorenzi, Springer, 2015
This book is aimed at the people making decisions above the clinician’s level: policy makers, application developers, scientists, and health-system executives, rather than the therapists actually running sessions. It’s less concerned with what a clinician does differently with a client. It’s more concerned with what an entire organization needs to get right first: how a mental health system evaluates, adopts, and pays for new technology responsibly.
That changes what the book is actually for. It’s less about using a specific app with a specific client, more about how an organization evaluates, adopts, and pays for new technology responsibly.
Recommended for a clinical director, practice owner, or anyone evaluating technology purchases at an organizational level. It’s less useful if you’re looking for guidance on a specific clinical technique to try with a client.