MEHMET BUĞRAHAN GÜRCAN, ALPEREN KILIÇ
Southern Clinics of Istanbul Eurasia - 2023;34(4):320-325
INTRODUCTION: With the announcement of the pandemic, in the era of countries with lockdown, city quarantines, postponed non-obligatory clinical appointments, and curfew, the importance of the shift of health-care services to virtual environment increased. In this study, it was aimed to interpret the search volumes of “telepsychiatry” and “online therapy” topics, one of the telemental health services, based on Google Trends, to evaluate the health seeking behavior in society and the demand for telemental health services. METHODS: Google Trends is a free to access tool that provides relative volume of the terms that people searched in Google engine. Relative Search Volumes on two topics, Telepsychiatry and Online Counseling, were obtained through Google Trends. Search titles are used as “topics” since they represent a group of terms in any language that Google trends covers. Results: Relative search results were evaluated as before and after the pandemic, online therapy and telepsychiatry. Comparisons that not normally distributed were assessed through MannWhitney U test. The search volume for telepsychiatry and online therapy after the pandemic increased significantly compared to before the pandemic (p<0.05). When search volumes in both before and after the pandemic were compared, interest to online therapy was superior than telepsychiatry in both periods (p<0.05). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: It could be said that, in time periods like pandemics and the cases that people cannot reach conventional mental health support, if the issues in legal, ethical, technical, therapeutic relationship, and professionalism could be overcome, the interest in telemental health would increase.
