Online therapy is gaining traction fast, and as more patients embrace its convenience, digital therapy tools make it easier to address depression as well as anxiety with personalized solutions.
If you’re keen to start designing your own online interventions and treatments, this article will show you how. We’ll explore the many advantages of using e-therapy tools in your programs, and show you how to craft your own using Quenza’s online therapy toolbox.
Before you continue, we think you’ll really enjoy full access to Quenza’s therapy toolbox with our $1, 30 day trial. If you help others improve their mental health, Quenza will help you share unique, personalized digital therapy tools with your clients for even better results.
5 Benefits of Using Tools in Therapy
In psychology, therapy tools describe the techniques and resources used by practitioners to help patients achieve their mental health goals.
Typically used as a complement to behavioral therapy, their primary benefit is to improve its efficiency.
Therapy tools may also serve the purpose of improving a patient’s emotional response to their therapeutic treatment.[1]
When used alongside professional counseling or online therapy, specialized tools can also help clients by:
- Encouraging a proactive approach to mental health
- Opening up fresh perspectives about themselves and their challenges, and
- Giving them new coping strategies for better self-management of symptoms and conditions.
8+ Examples of Popular Psychology Tools
Psychology tools can help patients overcome a range of mental health challenges – they are best thought of as strategies for addressing different client issues.
For instance, a patient may hope to:
- Enhance their personal or professional relationships
- Learn better coping mechanisms for dealing with anxiety or depression
- Cultivate emotional intelligence, resilience, or psychological flexibility
- Develop positive habits or behaviors, or
- Overcome the mental distress of trauma or challenge.
Depending on their mental health goals, needs, capabilities, and interests, they may benefit from learning tools that relate to their particular form of therapy.
Some examples include:
Therapy Tool | Goal |
|---|---|
| |
Case Formulations/Conceptualizations |
|
Cognitive Restructuring |
|
| |
Information Resources |
|
Skills Development Exercises/Activities |
|
Symptom Monitoring |
|
Thought Records |
|
Why Choose Digital Therapy Tools?
Psychology tools can help patients overcome a range of mental health challenges – they are best thought of as strategies for addressing different client issues.
Digital therapy tools can be brilliantly useful ways to introduce new psychological concepts to your clients during one-on-one sessions, especially when they include multimedia to clarify complex themes or demonstrate practical activities.
With a specialized mobile health app such as Quenza, you’ll often find ready-made digital therapy tools such as worksheets, diagrams, and journals for integrating into your clients’ treatment plans.
Alongside custom content features like Quenza’s Activity Builder, these can help you share online resources with a few distinct advantages.
For example, digital therapy tools can help you:
- Make your self-help techniques available at any time, which is especially useful for interventions like mindfulness meditations or Stress Diaries
- Share interventions and assessments at the most relevant times, when you automate their delivery according to a patient’s care pathway
- Make decisions based on real-time data – with digital tools, you can receive results as soon as clients complete an Activity
- Modify treatment plans faster, with more ease
- Provide relevant, timely support or answer patients’ questions between sessions, to improve the efficacy of your treatments while enhancing patient engagement.
The Best Software For Therapists
There are countless blended care solutions available for today’s digital practitioners, but as there are no formal regulations around telehealth to date, not all are regulated.
If your goal is to practice professional teletherapy online, a good rule of thumb is to choose a secure platform that provides:
- HIPAA compliance
- Treatment planning tools, like Quenza’s Pathways Tool
- Intervention design tools; Quenza’s Activity Builder is another good example
- Personalization features, such as client tokens and white-label features
- Real-time results tracking
- Client communication options, e.g. instant messaging or video chat
- Free mobile apps for your clients, so they can access your digital therapy tools and connect with you on the go.
For a sneak peek at how these work in practice, check out our guide to Using Quenza as an Online Counseling Platform. In this next section, we’ll zoom in on Quenza’s therapy toolbox so you can explore some of its exclusive, free treatment resources.
How To Use Quenza’s Activity Toolbox
Quenza’s Expansion Library features a host of frequently updated, fully customizable therapy tools for anxiety, depression, and emotional wellbeing that you can access with any practitioner account or your $1 trial.
These include science-based Activities to use as inspiration or to include directly within your patients’ treatments:
These are all ready to browse by Type (e.g. Assessment, Exercise, or Evaluation) in your free Expansion Library, where you can save them to your Quenza Library for customizing, personalizing, or sharing straight away.
If you’re keen to use your own videos, audio, or images, simply upload your files or share a video link to create unique, professional solutions for more engaging therapy.
You can also create your own digital therapy tools for depression, stress, and other conditions from blank templates with Quenza’s Activity Builder:
Your Activity Builder is a fast, straightforward way to craft therapy interventions from scratch before branding them with your practice logo and sharing them directly with clients.
It’s also an effective, efficient way to share counseling forms, feedback surveys, and promotional offers without any of the stress of paperwork.
Because your Activity Builder includes ready-made fields like check boxes, sections, page breaks, drop down menus, and more, you can craft your own frameworks and diagrams with ease:
This means you have everything you need to design and share bespoke therapy tools, such as the Wheel of Life coaching assessment tool shown here.
Your patients will be able to interact with your resources through Quenza’s private client portal as soon as you send them, and all their results will be automatically captured in real-time for you to view.
If you’re ready to assemble your Activities into full therapeutic programs, simply open a new Pathway using your Pathways Tool:
All you need to do is select different saved Activities as steps to start manually or automatically sharing entire treatment plans with your patients using Quenza’s Pathways Tool.
If you’d like to save even more time, you’ll also find a huge host of exclusive pre-made templates in your Expansion Library. These can be customized to suit your patients’ precise needs and even branded with your corporate logo.
Let’s take a look.
5 Anxiety Management Tools in Quenza
Quenza’s Expansion Library contains digital therapy tools for anxiety that can help your patients control stress and panic, both during their sessions and on their own throughout the day.
Some examples include mindfulness techniques, defusion frameworks, and breathing exercises like:
- Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion: Which helps clients separate from their thoughts and view them as mental events, rather than truths.
- Leaves on a Stream: An audio meditation teaching patients how to observe, rather than identify with, anxious thoughts
- Body Scan Meditation: A mindfulness meditation that trains the listener to be more open to sensory experiences, cultivating more acceptance.
- The 5-4-3-2-1 Stress Reduction Technique: By paying conscious attention to their senses with this technique, patients with anxiety can learn to “ground” themselves in the present moment, and
- Creative Visualization for Stress Reduction: Helping clients use mental imagery to connect the feeling of being relaxed, so they can revisit the feeling when stressful situations arise.
Overcoming Depression: 5 Activities
If you help patients manage symptoms of depression, Quenza’s tools are ideal for organizing and implementing content into online CBT programs.
They’re also well-suited to mood tracking, as shown below, when you use Pathways to help your clients record their emotions each day:
This Expansion Pathway Stress Diary is a ready-to-go therapy tool for anxiety that can quickly be modified to suit your clients’ particular treatment plan. With a few simple tweaks, it’s easy to develop digital client journals for depression symptoms or similar.
A few more therapy tools for depression include:
- Journaling Through Grief in 40 Days: Another Expansion Pathway that uses narrative therapy to help clients cope with the pain of loss
- Three Good Things: A training course to shift clients’ attention toward daily positive experiences
- Visualizing a Compassionate Self: An exercise to help clients with depression cultivate more self-kindness and self-love
- Transcending Pain: Using Personal Suffering to Benefit Others: This activity encourages clients to appreciate the value of their emotional wounds, hurts, and disappointments so they can be used to help others in pain, and
- A Personal Coping Mantra: A useful resource for patients who would like to use coping thoughts to better deal with stressful situations.
Final Thoughts
Digital therapy tools are incredibly valuable resources for any blended care practitioner, and brilliantly effective ways to make your treatments more engaging, effective, and satisfying.
If you’d like to try your hand at crafting your own, you’ll find plenty of inspiration in our How-To Guide to Using Digital Tools For Psychoeducation Therapy Interventions. Let us know how you go!
We hope you’ve found some helpful digital tools here to use in your sessions. Start creating unique e-therapy tools of your own by starting your $1, 30 day Quenza trial.
Quenza’s easy-to-use therapy toolbox contains everything you need to deliver personalized interventions and care Pathways under your professional brand, and will help you deliver personalized e-mental health solutions based on your patients’ unique goals.
References
- ^ Bunnell, B. E., Procci, K., Beidel, D. C., & Bowers, C. A. (2016). Gamification of Therapy: Treating Selective Mutism. In Handbook of Research on Holistic Perspectives in Gamification for Clinical Practice (pp. 390-410). IGI Global.
