Digital Approach to Improving Mental Health

This chapter focuses on investigating various digital approaches to improving mental health. Due to the increasing prevalence of various issues related to mental health worldwide, there is increasing interest in various approaches to improve mental well-being. We open this chapter with an overview of the current statistics about mental health problems and a short description of each of the most common mental disorders. This is followed by a description of various toolkits for designing mental health support applications, i.e., cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. We then present some of the most widely used applications for improving mental health, focused on various issues including depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Upon making a comparison of various approaches, we concluded that the applications are very similar. Furthermore, despite presumably focusing on different aspect of mental health, the applications include similar functionalities. Considering this, we conclude that the presented digital approaches to improving mental health serve as a preventative care and not as a tool for treatment of disorders.