Career Paths in Telemental Health

This visionary volume spotlights innovative mental health careers in today’s technology-driven climate while inspiring readers to create their own opportunities. Unique and engaging perspectives from professionals across disciplines and job titles describe the thought processes, ingenuity, and discipline behind matching technologies to the needs of specific populations and settings. These non-traditional paths show digital advances as used in frontline, complementary, supplemental, and alternative interventions, in academic and training settings, in private practice, and in systems facing transition. The diversity of these contributions illustrates the myriad openings technology presents for both professional fulfillment and clients’ improved well-being. 

Highlights of the coverage: 

• Crisis in the behavioral health classroom: enhancing knowledge, skills, and attitudes in telehealth training.
• Using technology in behavior analysis: a journey into telepractice.
• Making iCBT available in primary care settings: bridging the gap between research and regular healthcare.
• Improving veterans’ access to trauma services through clinical video telehealth.
• Virtual reality therapy for treatment of psychological disorders.
• Promoting and evaluating evidence-based telepsychology interventions.

For mental health practitioners, practitioners in training, researchers, academics, and policymakers, Career Paths in Telemental Health is an ideabook whose time has come―and continues to unfold.

Consultant, trainer, author and researcher, Marlene M. Maheu, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the TeleMental Health Institute, Inc., where she has overseen the development and delivery of professional training in telemental health via an eLearning platform that serves thousands of clinicians seeking professional training and consultation from more than 39 countries worldwide.

For more than twenty years, Dr. Maheu's focus has the legal and ethical risk management issues related to the use of technologies to better serve behavioral health clients and patients. She has served on a dozen professional association committees and task forces related to

​establishing standards and guidelines ​telehealth. She has written dozens of peer-reviewed articles and is lead author of multiple telehealth textbooks. 

​Dr. Maheu  is a technology developer and lectures internationally on the subject of best practices in the use of various technologies. She is a staunch advocate for technological change to reach more people, reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care via self-help, wireless technologies and telepractice.

Kenneth Drude, Ph.D. has a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Illinois. His telemental health interests include the ethics, standards, guidelines, policy and regulation of telemental health practice, and interprofessional relations. He chaired an Ohio Psychological Association committee that developed the first psychological association telepsychology guidelines in the United States in 2008.  Dr. Drude served on the Ohio Psychological Association governing board for 28 years in various capacities and as editor of The Ohio Psychologist. He currently is the president of the Ohio Board of Psychology. He was a member of the Association for State and Provincial Psychology Board's Telepsychology Task Force that developed an interstate psychology compact.He currently provides outpatient psychological services in a general private practice in Dayton, Ohio.

Dr. Shawna Wright is a licensed psychologist in Kansas and Nebraska who works in private practice as a telepsychologist.  She obtained her graduate training in clinical psychology from Texas Tech University specializing in child and family treatment.  She has worked for over a decade in community mental health in southeastern Kansas as outpatient therapist.  She is currently an operations manager for two community mental health center offices.   Through her experience in community mental health, Dr. Wright is acutely aware of the impact of the shortage of mental health providers in underserved, rural areas, and she sees the promise of utilizing telehealth as a medium for providing mental health services to this population.  In 2011, Dr. Wright completed a comprehensive telemental health certificate training program through the TeleMentalHealth Institute and initiated a private practice providing telepsychology services to residents of rural nursing facilities.  She is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Kansas Psychological Association (KPA), and the American Telemedicine Association.  Dr. Wright has a keen interest in working within these associations to develop standards, training, and resources to assist psychologist who are interested in telepsychology careers.  She is the membership chair for the Coalition of Technology in Behavioral Sciences (CTiBS) and maintains aspirations of sharing her professional experience to help advance professional resources for telepsychologist through educational endeavors and consultation.