Currently, whenever an astronaut needs to talk to someone, a counselor is only a radio call away. Unfortunately, for voyages further out, this contact time starts to increase quite a bit, so researchers have started to look for
alternative methods of counseling. I just hope the new counseling software has the Dr. Sbaitso voice.
"Instead of asking astronauts to reflect on their feelings, Mark Hegel of Dartmouth Medical School has them create lists of concrete things that are bothering them and brainstorm about practical ways to solve them. At the end of the exercise, users fill out a form used to diagnose depression. Clinical tests of this approach, which has never been tried in a multimedia self-help format, will start in a few months, using subjects recruited from the biomedical and engineering community in Boston."