11 Powerful Digital Tools for Mental Health

“Online forums, social media groups, and chat rooms offer a space for individuals to share experiences and support each other,” says social worker Emma Thompson. Check this post about health care fraud lawyers to boost your knowledge. Beyond Blue is a free app that produces a safety plan for users to follow when they are facing suicide thoughts, feelings, distress, or crisis. MindSpot provides free therapy courses if you are suffering from stress, worry, anxiety, poor mood, or depression.

School-based technologies

From this article, you will learn about the significant role of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and telehealth platforms, play in revolutionizing mental health care and support. These technological innovations https://www.ihs.gov/california/index.cfm/offices/oph/bh/resources/helpful-organizations/ provide accessible, convenient, and often cost-effective means for individuals to seek support, learn coping strategies, and track their progress toward better mental health care. Some people with mental health concerns will of course prefer to maintain privacy by using tools on their own, but many others will be engaged in the treatment of one kind or another such that coordination becomes salient. This study examined feedback from child and adolescent mental health care providers from a large community mental health organization on the use of digital tools used in care settings.

Other Emerging Aspects of Digital Mental Health

mental health technology tools

This makes digital mental healthcare a lot more affordable and available to a wider socioeconomic range. The integration of technology in mental healthcare has brought immense benefits, transforming access and quality of care. Hundreds of apps like Calm, Headspace, Wysa, and Woebot now offer mental health support using techniques like meditation, CBT, journaling, mood tracking, and AI-chatbots. Over the years, there has been an explosion of digital mental health tools offering innovative ways to address mental health needs. Emorphis Health is well-positioned to assist in building your mental health app, leveraging its expertise in software development and healthcare technology. By leveraging AI technologies, mental health professionals can enhance the precision, accessibility, and effectiveness of care, ultimately improving outcomes for individuals with mental health conditions.

mental health technology tools

A good anecdotal example from the fitness industry is the PureGym app (/app/) which acts as a kind of ‘digital glue’ to enhance the user experience of a gym. Younger generations may continue to expect most services to have a digital dimension, and indeed be ‘digital-first’. The younger generation has been coined ‘generation mute’19 given that they are more likely to use smartphones to text rather than making phone calls, which could be aligned to the adoption and acceptance of typed therapy using chat-based CBT or chatbots. In (b), the orange labels represent ‘wellbeing support’, the red labels represent ‘monitoring’, the green labels represent ‘treatment’ and the blue labels represent ‘training’. Apps are the best known format for a digital intervention; however, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can also be used to alleviate phobias using exposure therapy7. This revelation is most evident when observing human behaviour whilst people use any new technology.

mental health technology tools

A 2022 paper which looked at 578 mental health apps indexed in MIND and rated across 105 dimensions revealed that few apps offered innovative features and many represented privacy risks to users24. ORCHA is a UK-based organisation that assesses key aspects of health apps, including user experience, data privacy and aspects related to the app’s clinical assurance. Thousands of mental health apps are available and can be readily accessed by the general public, however only a small proportion of these have been assessed and accredited by organisations such as the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA) or the M-Health Index and Navigation Database (MIND). Having repeated measures of a users’ mental health and mood patterns may enhance the quality of mental health services, but like any data it must be high quality. This avoids recall bias and may be more useful to healthcare professionals in comparison to mental health scales which may be only ever administered in face-to-face psychotherapy sessions and rely on individuals answering questions retrospectively that are based on their feelings over the previous 2 weeks. Today, a number of traditional mental health services may only collect data from clients at a very low sampling rate where mental health scales are, for example, used at monthly talking therapy sessions.

  • We invite submissions on the development of digital assessments, adaptive testing platforms, and the integration of psychometrics with artificial intelligence.
  • Integration of advanced technology with traditional therapeutic approaches has improved mental health outcomes worldwide.
  • They need to be optimised and “task sharing” needs to be expanded to embrace digital self-help.
  • Additionally, many mental health billing services are now incorporating analytics dashboards that give providers insight into their revenue cycle performance.

The disadvantages of this app include overcoming of the barriers to app usage (eg, personal selection of modules and continuous cohort engagement), attrition rates, and engagement with clinical researchers for evaluation on a larger scale. A hybridized approach with HCI and XAI has the potential for a superior ability to rapidly adapt and effectively recognize, acknowledge, and address marginalized, distorted, acquiesced, and subsyndromal cases, among others. Jurisdictions changed regulatory and compensatory frameworks to allow providers and patients more flexibility in their care options during the COVID-19 pandemic .