Poster: Opportunities and Challenges in Mental Health Mobile Applications

Numerous mobile applications aimed at helping users with mental health goals exist in current smartphone application stores, and they are widely downloaded. However, there is some debate about how effective these applications might be, given many suffer from high attrition and stigmas around discussing mental health. This work aims to understand current challenges with and opportunities for these applications. Sampling from a dataset of 200,972 user reviews, we analyzed a representational set of 3016 user reviews to identify users who self-identified as using these applications to support their mental health goals (696, 23%). In addition to looking at the sentiment of these reviews, we identify mental health needs currently being served and attempt to identify under-served user groups. Here, we describe preliminary insights derived from our initial coding, which can inform researchers and application designers working in the area of mental health applications.