In June of this year, it will be 10 years since we launched AI-Therapy! At the time there weren’t many online programs available, and the Artificial Intelligence boom hadn’t started. People actually read blogs frequently and we wrote a lot of blogs from 2012 to 2015. Since then we have mainly published our information on our Facebook page. In fact, our last post was written in 2018 when our first Randomized Controlled Trial was published. In that study, researchers at the University Of British Columbia in Canada took our program and conducted an independent evaluation and the results were fantastic. Overcome Social Anxiety became a certified blueprint program for healthy youth development! This is a project at the University Of Colorado Boulder that maintains a registry of Evidence-Based Programs that improve the lives of youth.

Since then we have published 7 research papers, two of which are In Press, so I will write about them in my next posts. For the time being, here is an up-to-date publication list. Right before the pandemic hit, we managed to go to the last World Congress in Berlin in 2019:

Please watch this space as these are the titles coming up for our next blogs!

  • Overview of our latest research (7 journal articles!)
  • New Online Program: Overcome Fertility Stress
  • New Online Program: Overcome Death Anxiety
  • No, Bots and Artificial Intelligence does not mean the same thing in mental health care

Dr. Fjola Helgadottir, Ph.D. is the director of AI-Therapy, runs telehealth and face-to-face practice in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She is a registered psychologist in BC, Canada, and a fully licensed clinical psychologist in Iceland, prior to this she held registration in Australia and the UK as a clinical psychologist. She has 4 degrees in psychology and over the past 2 decades, Dr. Helgadottir has specialized in evidence-based treatment for complex psychological conditions. Her main areas of expertise are Social Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Health Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Fear of flying, and more. Dr. Helgadottir has been using Telehealth and innovating in health care since 2007. She received the Tracey Goodall Early Career Award for her innovations in online treatment. Dr. Helgadottir has also been involved in teaching cognitive behavior therapy over the years. Furthermore, she is an active clinical researcher working in collaboration with several universities around the globe. Twitter: @drfjola

Launch

Our July/August 2012 launch exceeded our expectations.  We’ve had over 3500 visits so far, so thanks to everyone for checking us out and helping spread the word. We’re still actively promoting the site, so please contact us if you have any ideas about how we can reach more people. Any links, blog reviews, etc. would be great.

 

New free online social anxiety symptom assessment

Shortly after launch we added a free symptom test for social anxiety.

 

More site content

We’ve made some updates to our website:

Blog

We will put out a new blog every week (give or take) on a wide range of topics. Some recent entries include:

Anger myths and facts – how to prevent future outbursts

How Excel can help you achieve goals

How to avoid the “Top 5 regrets of the dying”

The problem with self help books – they can make social anxiety worse!

Social phobia vs Spider phobia

Spider phobia (aka arachnophobia)

Future

We’ve got lots of exciting ideas in the works, so please keep an eye on the blog and come back soon!

 

Thank you for visiting! As always, we’d love to hear from you as our goal is to be constantly improving our site.

 

fdh

 

Fjola  Helgadottir, PhD, MClinPsych, is a clinical psychologist, a senior research clinician at the University of Oxford, and is a co-creator of AI-Therapy.com, an online CBT treatment program for overcoming social anxiety