Cybersecurity in Digital Mental Health

There has been a surge in the supply and demand of digital mental health support services in recent times. There have also been high profile cyberattacks specifically targeting mental health and behavioural services, along with a shift toward targeting vulnerable people directly. Cyberattacks involving personal health data, especially sensitive mental health data, could have devastating consequences to vulnerable people, those close to them, and many additional stakeholders and society. While digital transformations of mental health support and services can offer new tools for making decisions, sharing information, and delivering services remotely there is a clear lack of prioritisation dedicated to security, which could harm the delivery of care, especially life-saving services.

One of the current issues that this field faces is that while many technical solutions exist there is a lack of adoption of such technical capabilities. Furthermore, there is a significant lack of attention and rigorous examination of much broader factors related to cybersecurity in digital mental health spaces, such as the human perspective, the need for collection and interpretation of threat intelligence data, bringing awareness to current and future policies, and the creation of appropriate processes to deal with threats effectively. The aim of this Research Topic on cybersecurity in digital mental health is to promote knowledge exchange to contribute toward developing a global culture around cybersecurity in digital mental health.

This call for participation welcomes all article types related to the topics listed below, and we welcome enquiries about other areas:
Human Factors, Human Impact, Human Involvement, and Human Vulnerability. For example:
o How to support victims of cyberattacks. What are the types of harms that can occur and what impact does this have on victims and those close to them?
o What best practices are available for victim support responses? Incident response planning for potentially life-threatening service disruptions/issues?
o What psychological factors motivate hacking and social engineering tactics?
o How can we address issues such as intimate partner surveillance?
o How can we support online security for practitioners?
o How can we measure the impact on employee

Keywords: cybersecurity, digital mental health, victim support, security by design, cyberpsychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.