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Investigating the Relationship Between Mental Health Symptoms and Health App Preferences in the United Kingdom
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental health problems are highly prevalent with mental health apps emerging as a potential scalable solution. However, in the current policy environment, it remains unclear to what extent clinical populations are benefiting from or at risk of suboptimal outcomes from of the mental health app market.
Objective:
To investigate the relationship between mental health symptoms and health app preferences, specifically examining if symptom presence correlates with mental health app usage and selection, and how symptom severity correlates with engagement patterns.
Methods:
A representative survey of 2000 UK working adults was conducted. Mental health apps mentioned were reviewed and categorised based on their features and the problems they target. We analysed relationships between participant characteristics and app category usage and assessed associations between participant factors and engagement metrics.
Results:
The study found that 36% of participants reported using a health app, with higher usage rates among younger and more educated individuals. We classified apps in use as General Wellness, Medical Healthcare, Physical Health, Women’s Health, Casual Mental Health and Clinical Mental Health, the distinction between the latter two categories being the presence of casual self-help vs clinically focused evidence-based features. Casual mental health apps, which accounted for 46% of total app mentions, were far more popular than clinical mental health apps (7%). A strong relationship was observed between symptom severity and the use of both casual and clinical mental health apps. Age consistently correlated with longer duration of app use across all categories.
Conclusions:
Many individuals with mental health symptoms seek out mental health apps, but most engage with casual apps over evidence-based clinical ones. The majority of those with complex mental health needs may not be accessing the most clinically appropriate app-based interventions. Future research should establish clearer impact metrics for clinical apps beyond engagement and examine the clinical effectiveness of mental health apps more rigorously. Policy initiatives to improve app labelling and increase transparency around evidence-based features are also warranted.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.