What Are Mobile Mental Health Apps? A Clinical Psychology and Cyberpsychology Podcast Episode.

From artificial intelligence to chatbots to apps, technology is everywhere and it impacts every single aspect of our lives. Also, if you watch YouTube, the TV or see any ads, you are bound to see or hear about apps that are meant to support your mental health. Yet what are mobile mental health apps? Do they work? Can apps actually improve our mental health? In this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what are mobile mental health apps, why might they work to improve our mental health and so much more. If you enjoy learning about psychotherapy, how technology impacts behaviour and how clinical psychology works in the real world, then this will be a perfect episode for you.

Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Could Apps Improve Our Mental Health? Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.

What Are Mobile Mental Health Apps? Extract from Could Apps Improve Our Mental Health? COPYRIGHT 2025 CONNOR WHITELEY.

Something I have started to become more and more aware of in the past few years is how technology is going to impact mental health treatment, because as I mentioned in the general introduction, whenever there is a technological change this provides us with new ways of delivering psychological therapy. For example, the rise and increased access to the internet has meant therapists can deliver therapeutic interventions online.

Therefore, it’s going to be great fun sharing a lot of fascinating information with you about mental health apps, as well as sharing my own thoughts and feelings on these different topics. Especially, as the majority of the information in this book is based on came from a literature review I did during my placement year in my undergraduate degree. Then I’ve added and updated information too. The only real problem with a literature review is that you cannot add in your own thoughts and feelings based on other psychological concepts and topics that you’ve learnt.

This is why I flat out love sharing information through books because I can share these evidence-based facts to bring the material alive.

This book is going to be a lot of fun.

Introduction To Mental Health Apps

It turns out that I’m not the only person in mental health who’s excited about the opportunities that online interventions provide us with, because in recent years, there’s been an overall increased reliance on digital platforms to mental health services, like mobile applications (which from this point forward I’m going to be referring to as apps). This is similar to telemedicine, the form of providing healthcare services through means like videoconferencing, internet and wireless communications (like phones).

In my opinion, this is a very useful way to increase access to services, because it means you can decrease barriers to accessing healthcare. For example, me and my housemates at the time of writing are all university students (I’m Masters and they are all undergraduate). Also, one of our housemates has mental health difficulties so their sleeping is terrible and in the UK if you want any hope of getting a doctor’s appointment, you NEED to be awake at 8 am and call your doctor. Otherwise you miss out.

Yet our university schedules and work commitment make attending doctor’s appointments very difficult, including traveling to the doctor’s. Therefore, sparing five, ten minutes is a lot easier on the phone to the doctor.

When it comes to mobile mental health (in the literature this is referred to as mHealth, but in this book, I focus on mental health apps) refers to the use of mobile phones and wireless devices for psychiatric and mental health practice. For example, this can include online formats that range from online therapy, “eHealth”, health information technology amongst others (Chan et al., 2014).

This has led app developers as well as mental health professionals to realise that there is a massive potential for delivering health interventions through a client’s mobile device. A potential that as you’re going to see throughout the book could be flat out critical and very useful to a lot of clients despite the challenges these mental health apps face.

Again, we’ll look at these challenges throughout the book too.

As a result, in this book, you’re going to be learning about mental health apps, how they perform as behavioural interventions when used to treat mental health conditions, and how they could be improved. Thankfully, there is a lot of research conducted on these apps so over the decades, we’ve been able to understand and get a lot of insight into how effective mental health apps are, and this research helps us to isolate areas that require improvement.

In addition, this book focuses on mental health apps with a basis of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as CBT is the most common and widely accessible method of behavioural interventions. In the next chapter, you’ll learn why CBT is used and why I flat out love CBT as a method of therapy, especially when it comes to behavioural experiments amongst other cognitive interventions.

Moreover, the vast majority of reviewed and researched mental health apps are CBT-based (Marciniak et al., 2020). Although, it isn’t the only basis because there are behavioural interventions that we’ll look at in the later chapters of the book that translate well into CBT-based and other forms of mental health apps.

Nonetheless, there are some forms of behavioural interventions that do not translate very well into mental health apps. For example, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Systemic Therapy would not be translated well to mHealth apps because MBCT relies on weekly sessions and guided mediations (Batink et al., 2013) as well as systemic therapy involves working with a family system (Pinsoff et al., 2018).

Although, I will admit that even though these general models do not translate well, especially systemic therapy (one of my favourite models), there are elements of these therapeutic approaches that can be translated well into these apps. In particular, you’ll learn about how mediation and mindfulness are incorporated into these apps.

Furthermore, the current state of technology dictates that other popular rising interventions, such as virtual reality or brain stimulation, simply cannot be adapted to mobile apps without further technological advancements. Also, an important distinction that we need to make so we’re clear is that these apps are considered “CBT-based”. This means that while they are steeped in the same principles as traditional CBT and have shown high efficacy as mental health interventions (Chandrashekar, 2018), there are doubts over their ability to address anything more than just the symptomology of depression.

Personally, I think this is a very interesting and critical argument, because this is largely the focus of this book. Questions around effectiveness and engagement are critical to the driving question of this book, could apps improve our mental health. 

Since the problem is that if we find out through empirical research that mental health apps only address symptoms without bringing round therapeutic change that will not only decrease psychological distress but teach the clients more adaptive coping mechanisms for the long-term so their life can improve. Then unfortunately, this will mean in comparison to traditional Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, apps will be largely useless.

Although, the unfortunate state of the world with the underfunding, the understaffing and the extreme demand for mental health services means that mental health apps are needed so badly. I explain why in future chapters but mental health apps could prove to be critical in filling this demand and helping support clients given the shortage of mental health professionals for traditional CBT.

In other words, mental health apps could be capable of providing widespread mental health treatments (Messner et al., 2019), and to see whether this is true, we need to really dig down into a lot of fascinating facets of these behavioural interventions.

Another reason why mental health apps are important to investigate is because there’s been a notable global increase in cases related to mental health. Especially, when it comes to adolescents and young adults, because these age groups are commonly attributed to a peak in the onset of mental health difficulties (Ridout & Campbell, 2018). For example, a systematic review by McCloud et al. (2020) revealed that depression has a 30.6% prevalence amongst university students worldwide. As well as mental health difficulties have been intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people experiencing elevated levels of stress or anxiety, as well as feelings of loneliness and hopelessness. All of these mental health difficulties have been exacerbated by quarantine and lockdown measures (Brooks et al., 2020).

I learnt about this sharp increase in mental health difficulties first-hand through my work at my university doing Outreach and Widening Participation work. Since I wanted to create a session on a given mental health condition to give students a taste of what life as a psychology student was like. I wanted to focus on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder because at the time I was dealing with this chronically because of my sexual trauma. Yet I wasn’t allowed to by my university because they were concerned any session on mental health conditions would be too triggering for students, because so many students were experiencing intense mental health difficulties.

This is even more likely because Outreach works with students from disadvantaged and poor backgrounds that traditionally do not go on to university. And there is a lot of research evidence on the link between poverty, financial stress and mental health conditions.

An additional reason why mental health apps are important to investigate is because they help to reduce barriers to mental health treatment. Since receiving face-to-face treatments for some clients is very problematic and it adds additional cultural, geographical as well as physical barriers to treatment. Therefore, mental health apps might be a useful way to overcome these challenges (Chan et al., 2014).

Essentially, this is why I am very excited about mental health apps, because if they work, if we can refine them and if we can make them as effective as possible using the features discussed in this book. Then we have a great way to bring round therapeutic change and improving lives for a whole group of clinical individuals that may never have been able to be helped before.

That is amazing and that is why I love clinical psychology.

As a result, the ability of mental health apps to overcome barriers to treatment is of particular importance. Since research has shown that people with mental health conditions are often stigmatised so these individuals are more likely to use online health information (An & Lee, 2020) and that online mental health interventions can benefit clients from traditionally oppressed groups, who are typically less likely to adhere to and receive treatment than their middle-class counterparts (Alegria et al., 2008).

In addition, these individuals are less likely to adhere to treatment over time despite believing that treatment is beneficial (Kinzie et al., 1987). Yet because of its mobile nature, mental health apps have a great potential to overcome barriers that interfere with treatment adherence (Chan et al., 2014) such as low-paying jobs, jobs without health benefits, family care obligations, and inadequate transportation.

This challenge of engagement treatment adherence is a core part of the next few chapters because it so interesting and so important to the effectiveness of mental health apps.

Moreover, research has proven that online mental health interventions are just as effective as traditional face-to-face treatments (Fuller-Tyszkiewicz et al., 2018) and so this can help institutions to cope with growing demand for mental health services. This is highlighted by an increase in diversity of mobile mental health apps currently available, ranging from online therapy, mood trackers, self-help, and chatbots (Bharti et al., 2020).

Finally, there are several literature reviews that provide recommendations targeted towards app developers to ensure up-to-date and medically accurate advice and tips, cross-app compatibility, as well as features integral to typical self-management and symptoms/physiological levels monitoring (Brzan et al., 2016; Paratore, 2020; Pham et al., 2019). Also, while there is a large volume of mental health apps on the market, the psychological foundation of these apps is very questionable.

One of the reasons I wrote this book in the first place.

With the psychological foundation of these apps being questionable, we absolutely have to ensure that these apps do actually have a clear and empirical psychological foundation because it is only by having a clear psychological foundation that these apps can ever hope to be effective (Paratore, 2020).

Then there’s a darker side.

If mental health apps are used incorrectly by the app recommending wrong or unfit interventions to clients that are already struggling with their mental health, or worse if an app recommends dangerous advice (there’s an anorexia example later in the book) then this can be devastating for already-vulnerable individuals (Dimidjian & Hollon, 2010).

Ultimately, in this book, we’re going to be investigating the effectiveness of mental health apps as behavioural interventions, exploring different aspects. For example, CBT implementation, engagement, app related features, and user-related features.

We’re doing this because if we examine these factors, we can effectively understand how these apps implement CBT principles as well as how they keep users engaged and prevent dropout. As well as we’re looking at the app and user related features so we can consider how these features impact the efficacy and effectiveness of mental health apps.

Let’s kick off the next great part of this book with an interesting look at how exactly CBT is actually used in these mental health apps.

Is CBT actually used effectively in these apps or is it more CBT-lite? Find out next.

I hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.

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Have a great day.

Clinical Psychology and Cyberpsychology Reference

Whiteley, C. (2025) Could Apps Improve Our Mental Health? CGD Publishing. England.

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