Abstract
In 2017, an interest group on online psychological interventions was formed within the SPR-Italian Area Group and set the following main objectives: a) to develop an Italian network of psychologists and psychotherapists using or interested in using the Internet and related technologies to provide remote psychological interventions; b) to promote scientific research on the processes and outcomes of online psychological interventions in Italy; (c) to facilitate collaboration among members in planning, discussion, and conduct of methodologically sound, large-scale multi-center studies on the mechanisms, efficacy and effectiveness of online psychological interventions; d) to plan and deliver workshops on the ethics and practice of online psychological interventions. This symposium has the aim to present the interest group to the SPR meeting participants and includes four oral presentations. The first one concerns the ethics of online psychological interventions and is focused on the new Italian guidelines that were developed and published by Italian National Council of Psychologists (CNOP) in 2017. The second presentation describes the EU-funded MASTERMIND project and focuses on the pros and cons of providing Internet interventions to patients with a depressive disorder. The third speech presents and reports the preliminary findings of the SHARED trial, a randomized and multi-center clinical study that aims to test the acceptability and effectiveness of a six-week online guided self-help intervention for outpatients with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. The forth contribution concerns the mental health and remote psychological treatment of expatriates, and describes an exploratory study whose aims were to investigate the difficulties that may occur during the experience of expatriation, international commuting or mobility in general, and to understand the subjective experiences of therapists providing internet interventions to expatriates in order to develop a new paradigm of psychological counseling and short online therapy for workers in conditions of international mobility.