Meet the New Mental Health Workforce: Cyberpsychologists, Healthy Device Advisors

This is an exclusive BHB+ story

Behavioral health companies are now hiring for new positions that didn’t exist three or even five years ago.

Roles like “cyberpsychologist,” “media psychologist,” and “advisor of health device management” are becoming more common as technology is integrated even further into all facets of U.S. health care.

The explosion of artificial intelligence-powered tools, apps and techniques in the behavioral health space, plus persistent concerns about the impact of screen time and social media on mental health, are spurring the rise of new roles and areas of expertise. With that comes growing demand from patients, health systems and practices to have trained specialists who can navigate these new waters.

“I think as we’re innovating health care with these new measures and tools, there’s a really good opportunity to sort of reshuffle the cards and make sure that everybody benefits from that,” Dr. Mitchel Kappen, a psychiatrist and the partnerships lead overseeing technology, digital and consumer products at the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), told Behavioral Health Business.

DiMe is a global nonprofit and the professional society for practitioners in digital medicine.

The rise of these new roles and titles is “evolutionary,” Kappen said, and necessary for the field to keep evolving along with the technology that’s increasingly backing it.

“I see this era as sort of like survival of the fittest,” Kappen said. “If these roles make sense, they will survive, and they will become more mainstream. Maybe we’ll start to see a chief digital psychologist, or a similar thing. That’s what worked with chief medical information officers. You never saw them before, and then slowly but steadily, there became a need for them, and it survived.”

Market projections estimate that AI in the behavioral and mental health sector could reach between $7.82 billion and $8.53 billion by 2030, which will only underscore the need for professionals who understand both.

With almost every passing week, new AI-infused solutions, chatbot tools or platforms are popping up at therapy-focused companies and within health systems. Since the beginning of October, major players in this sector like SonderMind, Lyra Health and Spring Health have introduced new AI tools for clinicians and patients.

Even LG Electronics recently launched its own AI-backed mental health platform last week, capitalizing on the momentum in an arena where demand for nearly instant access to quality mental health care is growing.

The job description

As the sector becomes further saturated with technology, the job of these new digitally-focused behavioral health professionals may also become important for compliance and efficiency – two areas that are still being fleshed out at the intersection of health and AI.

The job descriptions for these novel roles vary, but broadly they’re responsible for evaluating and advising on strategies related to digital health and AI for their specific health systems or practices in a patient-centric way.

Dr. Don Grant, a media psychologist and national advisor of healthy device management at Newport Healthcare, a Nashville, Tennessee-based pediatric and young adult behavioral health care provider, told BHB that roles like his are a bridge that works to “increasingly synergize worlds of technology and behavioral health.”

“I believe it is not only important – but crucial – for behavioral health organizations to commit and dedicate leadership positions to the intersection of psychology, psychiatry and technology to concurrently drive successful innovation while ensuring that the digital tools utilized support patient care ethically, safely and effectively,” Grant said.

Not only does he research and advise on current and emerging technologies in the role’s capacity, Grant teaches patients and their families how to build sustainable and healthy management skills with the technology already embedded into their daily lives too.

That’s a focus of the new Trump administration as well. The recently published Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy highlighted persistent technology use, screen time and social media as key areas of concern for youth health. While not all the claims in the Health and Human Services Department’s accompanying report were backed, growing research underlines the damaging effects technology can have on adolescents.

One in four teenagers whose screen time averages four hours or longer per day experience anxiety and depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“If we identify any existing or potentially problematic media and techno-centric behaviors, risks, or unfavorable outcomes of use, we work together to create improved, sustainable, healthier and safer skills and behaviors,” Grant said.

Dr. Rachel Wood, cyberpsychology researcher and the founder of the AI Mental Health Collective, studies the “digitally connected human experience” and its impact on mental wellness as well as the implications. 

The AI Mental Health Collective is a group of mental health clinicians, technologists, legal experts and academics focused on cross-discipline dialogue about the emergence of AI in the field.

Much of her work also focuses on the ethical integration of AI across different parts of the behavioral health sector. Wood describes her approach as “neither alarmist nor evangelist” but focused on addressing an aspect that the field can no longer ignore. This is particularly important, she said, since new AI functions like ChatGPT may be the largest provider of mental health support in the U.S., according to some reports.

“This is happening. We don’t have a choice with this,” Wood told BHB. “We can’t say that this is fringe. It’s not. It is becoming more and more mainstream, and people are turning to AI. So, it’s important that we are educated, we’re aware, and we’re able to have really meaningful and nuanced conversations about it.”

Some of these tools offer efficiency for clinician note-taking assistance and can be plugged into a variety of workflow pathways to ease administrative burdens.

Yet, other use cases can – and have – proven to be dangerous with few guardrails, like in the ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI, the tech-giant behind ChatGPT that is valued at $500 billion, in which a 16-year-old committed suicide after the bot walked him through “best” techniques to do so.

More education is needed to carve out parameters and really integrate tools like this into mental health systems, Wood explained, but a healthier future for tools like this is likely to be hybrid, clinician-involved and embedded with safety guardrails.

Growing the pipeline of digital behavioral health specialists

Wood has a PhD in cyberpsychology, but across the board, formal education programs at the intersection of mental health and these very new and rapidly developing technologies are few and far between.

As developments in this space are speeding up, not slowing, it doesn’t mean that every therapist or clinician must use these innovations, but what is important is “that they get enough information and education to make a critically informed decision” about whether to use them and feel empowered to do so if they choose to, she explained.

“It’s really important that those who are coming up in this field of expertise understand how this is shifting and shaping the relational bedrock of society,” Wood said.

To keep the pipeline of roles like these fueled, Grant said he feels it is only responsible for schools and behavioral health education programs to “incorporate more formal training in digital and AI literacy.”

“This is driven by the urgent need to prepare future providers with the skills they need to utilize AI tools responsibly and deliver exceptional care in an increasingly digital healthcare landscape,” Grant said. “As this shift occurs, I believe that the next generation of behavioral healthcare providers will require a truly balanced blend of technical competency and human-centered skills to work alongside AI.”

Some smaller initiatives and training around AI and incorporating digital wellness practices within behavioral health modalities are already in existence, but Kappen and others at DiME hope to see these increase in time.

“Because AI innovation is going so quickly, honestly, sometimes it’s hard to keep up, and especially for all the players in the field,” Kappen said.

DiME is also rolling out its own initiatives in this vein to train clinicians on the latest AI tools and ethics.

“I think the main thing is just be ready to innovate and be ready to adopt new things, but also think critically about it and see where opportunity and risks lie,” Kappen said. “If we keep thinking from a health-first perspective, then I think we can go a long way.”