Adventures in telepsychiatry

The patients whom I treat by telepsychiatry tend to be younger than the patients whom I see face to face. This isn’t much of a surprise, as people who’ve grown up with email and the Internet have much less resistance to trying something new and, up to now, I haven’t had really much in the way of trouble with patients trying to use Skype but not really understanding what they needed to do.

Last week though, I was talking with a patient and I suggested that we do our next session via Skype as he was going to be away and we were planning on doing a telephone visit anyway. He didn’t really understand what Skype was, and so I spent a few minutes trying to explain it to him.

After he left, I thought that maybe getting into the nitty gritty of how to install Skype was getting to be a little bit away from what I thought was a good use of his time during our session.

I decided to see what was available via the Internet and found some resources that I’ve put on my practice website’s page on Skype .

The first problem I needed to address was trying to explain what Skype was. I found a nice YouTube video clip called

The video doesn’t really explain anything about how to use Skype. Instead, it just lets someone know what Skype is.

After understanding what Skype is and reassuring people that, yes, it doesn’t indeed cost anything to talk to me, the next thing to do is to install it. The Skype site  has a fairly easy to understand section on this.

After downloading, the next thing is to read about how to use it. Again, the Skype site has some pretty straightforward instructions.

And, for those people who somehow feel that it is better to kill trees so they can read something on paper rather than a screen, I found a nice guide on the UNC School of Education site with a nice “Getting Started with Skype” pdf file. There is a little bit of UNC specific information in this document, but I liked the organization. (I guess teachers are good at writing good instructions!)

I’m going out this weekend to buy another (cheap) webcam that I can lend to patients to try Skype out so that they can see whether they like it before they spend any money on a webcam. Black Friday sales anyone?

If you know some other good (free) introductory material on Skype for people who aren’t totally computer literate, I would appreciate it if you would let me know.