Popular mental health apps (MH apps) as a complement to telepsychotherapy: Guidelines for consideration.

Abstract

With the increasing need to minimize in-person contact as a way to stem the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus across the world, many clinicians are now providing mental health care exclusively through telepsychotherapy. Mental health mobile applications (MH apps) offer clients complementary therapeutic resources available outside of the telepsychotherapy session and have the potential to enhance the quality of care. However, not all mental health apps are created equal and clinicians lack guidance on how best to evaluate MH apps. This article discusses several ethical and practical considerations involved in using MH apps as an adjunct to telepsychotherapy, proposes recommendations for app evaluation, and provides a summary table of 28 popular English-language MH apps to assist clinicians in evaluating the manyMHapps available on the market today. The authors conducted a review of recent literature in EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and included 10 peer reviewed, English language meta-analyses and systematic reviews on the efficacy of MH apps. The emerging literature suggests that the MH apps that have been studied in randomized control trials provide some benefit for targeted problems (e.g., depression) over waitlist control groups and under some circumstances are comparable to active intervention groups, although effect sizes tend to be small. However, of the 28 popular MH apps featured in this article, only 5 were found to have empirical support. Of note, few empirical studies reference any harmful effects, although risks have been posited.