Detached co-involvement in interactional care: Transcending temporality and spatiality through mHealth in a social psychiatry out-patient setting

This article explores how the integration of digital technology into healthcare processes of social psychiatry impacts the healthcare professional-patient relation. To this end, it adopts a new materialist perspective, viewing the context of social psychiatry as an assemblage of human and technological components and their relations. We draw on a qualitative study of the introduction of an mHealth platform including shared calendars, messaging, and video calls into the care processes of a social psychiatry out-patient setting in Denmark. The study demonstrates how technology acceptance is facilitated by familiarity and relational trust, how the platform streamlines routine care tasks by providing shared structures, and how the platform allows for a multi-channel approach to interactional care. The analysis reveals an emerging type of care interaction, detached co-involvement, which appears to strengthen the healthcare professional-patient relation and concomitantly increase patient autonomy by facilitating temporally and spatially detached albeit more frequent interactions. The implications of these findings extend beyond the context of social psychiatry. First, they demonstrate that the careful integration of digital technology into care processes has the potential to increase the involvement of and even empower mentally vulnerable patients. Second, they demonstrate how adding such technology can extend an assemblage temporally and spatially and, consequently, allow components to remain attached to it while they attach to and detach from other assemblages. •mHealth can enhance care processes and relations through detached co-involvement.•mHealth might increase the autonomy of and empower mentally vulnerable patients.•Technological solutions should supplement, not replace, direct care interactions.•Familiarity and relational trust ease the acceptance of technological solutions.•Care assemblages can be extended spatially or temporally by mHealth technologies.