Digital Psychiatry for the Treatment of Comorbid Disorders

Psychiatric and medical comorbidities are extremely common, posing significant challenges to traditional psychiatric treatment approaches. The emergence of digital health offers a promising avenue for addressing these complexities through integrated and personalised care. This chapter explores the transformative potential of digital psychiatry in the treatment of comorbid disorders. It briefly examines the role of telemedicine, mobile applications, wearable devices and artificial intelligence in providing comprehensive assessment, targeted interventions and ongoing monitoring for patients with medical conditions. The chapter also provides a comprehensive summary of currently available scientific evidence about the applications of digital psychiatry in the management of the most frequent medical comorbidities among people with severe mental illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, obesity and metabolic syndrome, neoplastic diseases, rheumatologic diseases, infectious diseases and substance use disorders.