ABSTRACT
The field of mental health is becoming increasingly digitally mediated. A broad range of digital developments in mental health services has been proposed, from providing advice and guidance to people suffering with various mental health difficulties, through to creating digital versions of established treatments and therapeutic interventions (e.g. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT]). The App Industry has seen considerable potential in direct marketing digital aids to common mental health difficulties, such as stress, depression, and anxiety. Indeed, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store each have tens of thousands of mental health-related apps on offer. There is also an appetite for machine learning and big data analytics to gather previously unattainable large-scale data sets, which can be used to design digital tools using artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g. chatbots). Mental health care in a digital age is consequently beginning to look very different to previous location-based services (e.g. institutions, community). Digital forms of support are not tied to specific locations but can be temporally and spatially ready to hand and, consequently, not so reliant on real time access to mental health services. As such, they have considerable potential to intersect with individuals’ ongoing emotional experiences, both in relation to their underlying distress and through facilitating key aspects of support such as creating and maintaining peer relationships.
