....actually, my first thought was THESE PEOPLE CAN COME INTO YOUR HOME NOW. Can you imagine being a kid and having this indoctrination happen in your living room a few days a week? There is nowhere you'd feel safe anymore.
What it seems to me is that they're getting into more and more vulnerable patient populations. It's around that CBT and GET are harmful to patients, but if you get them young enough, they won't be able to put up a fight: they're more likely to agree to whatever an authority figure tells them is the case.
Moreover, you've got their parents between a rock and a hard place. A computer program would make GET and CBT so universally available that you as a parent could no longer say you're too far out in the boonies to take your kid to therapy: it can come to you through your computer. And if you refuse, you're clearly an abuser with Munchhausen by Proxy.
Yes, I can see all that, but...
The way ME "treatment" works in the UK tends to be that you get entangled with actual people, some of whom become distinctly difficult to shake off. I can see the prospect of a computer programme spreading treatment in this way has a distinctly unnerving element, but given the way that things are prescribed in this country, I can see this likely becoming the first thing doctors throw out there to get patients out of the door so as to hopefully never see them again, rather than anything that gets people near a "specialist" team, the likes of which may well start to dwindle given that results are likely to be pretty shabby either way.
This is important. Actual people can put you under pressure (and I can assure you, if they want to get into your home, they will do anyway). If symptoms are getting in the way of undertaking the programme, actual people will argue the point out, usually with accusations and sulks. A computer programme that talks bollocks however can, and will, be turned off.
The key thing about psychiatry, both good and bad, is the relationship with the therapist. Computer CBT is a ridiculous fad because it thinks it can dispense with this and it's already being called out as such. Patients with depression and anxiety who benefited to a large degree from seeing a friendly face are now faced with the ultimate expression of the health system's indifference to them and it doesn't go down well. However, in our sphere, this is a stroke of luck - indifference and neglect is the best we can hope for until something changes. God forbid someone should take an interest.
If the alternative is that, eventually, the likes of White prevail in getting CBT/GET rolled out with practitioners across the country, getting in peoples faces and not taking no for an answer, I say: bring on the computers. At least they have an off switch.