Psychiatric rehabilitation through teaching smartphone skills to improve functional outcomes in serious mental illness

This study measured the impact of a digital competencies and skills course on participants with serious mental illness. Close to 75% of participants reported an improvement in a smartphone related skill, and the majority of participants that reported improvement in one skill reported improvement in at least one other. Qualitative feedback from participants suggests how digital competencies acquired were used to immediately support functional outcomes. Objective: To improve functional outcomes in patients with serious mental illness through a multi-session curriculum designed to improve smartphone skills and engage participants in group learning and problem solving, targeting negative and cognitive symptoms of illness. Methods: An eight-week smartphone digital competencies and skills course was offered to two distinct groups of youth with serious mental illness. Pre and post self-report measurements were captured for each participant for each session. Results: Group participation varied by session, but overall 28 unique patients attended. From survey results, 75% reported improvement in smartphone related skills because of the groups. Qualitative feedback suggests how skills acquired by patients were immediately utilized to gain insight into health and support functional outcomes. Conclusions and implications for practice: Smartphone skills groups are a means to provide practical psychiatric rehabilitation that may enable some patients to compensate for cognitive and social deficits due to illness. While ensuring groups are responsive to patients with varying degrees of skills remains a challenge, adapting lesson structures and mediums, as well as creating new measurement tools, offers a means to modify the course with the clinical need.