Counselor's Corner » MENTAL HEALTH APPS/WEBSITES

MENTAL HEALTH APPS/WEBSITES

While APPS/WEBSITES are not a replacement for in-person help, for people suffering, they can provide resources right in the palm of their hands. Some resources are free, some are free with in-app purchases, and others have either a one-time fee or a subscription fee. 
ANXIETY
When you search for “anxiety apps”,  it results in a variety of approaches including mindfulness, gratitude, stress relief, journaling, yoga, and self-hypnosis. When deciding on the best tactic consider the cause of your anxiety. Anxiety apps are similar to self-help books: The message might be similar, but it should be tailored to your situation.
  • Calm offers meditation help and designed to lower stress and anxiety and improve sleep. In addition to meditation exercises, the app includes sleep stories, breathing exercises along with soothing music and photos of nature.
  • Headspace focuses on guided meditation, mindfulness, and sleep and aims to reduce stress and anxiety with courses on meditation, workouts, and sleep improvement.
  • Daylio is a tracking app that helps users log moods, exercise, meals, activities and can function as a journal. Charts and stats can be reviewed for patterns or reflection. In terms of privacy, user data is stored locally, and data is not collected by the app’s creator.
  • MindShift is one of the best mental health apps designed specifically for teens and young adults with anxiety. Rather than trying to avoid anxious feelings, Mind Shift stresses the importance of changing how you think about anxiety. Think of this app as the cheerleader in your pocket, encouraging you to take charge of your life, ride out intense emotions, and face challenging situations.
  • SAM might be perfect for you if you’re interested in self-help, but meditation isn’t your thing. Users are prompted to build their own 24-hour anxiety toolkit that allows you to track anxious thoughts and behavior over time, and learn 25 different self-help techniques. You can also use SAM’s “Social Cloud” feature to confidentially connect with other users in an online community for additional support.
DEPRESSION
Mood-tracking apps can be helpful to manage depression and are a handy replacement for the pen-and-paper method of tracking behaviors, moods, and patterns on worksheets. Apps not only make the process come easier, but they can give reminders to log moods and track trends over time, so those can be very helpful when you need to describe what your days look like. 
  • Sanvello is designed to help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms. Reviewers suggested this could help people with mild to moderate depression but not moderate to severe depression.
  • Mood Tools is a mood-tracking app that focuses on alleviating depression symptoms. Reviewers liked the app’s features such as the Thought Diary, activity and video suggestions, PH-9 questionnaire, and suicide safety plan.
  • Happify -Need a happy fix? With its psychologist-approved mood-training program, the Happify app is your fast-track to a good mood. Try various engaging games, activity suggestions, gratitude prompts and more to train your brain as if it were a muscle, to overcome negative thoughts. The best part? Its free! 
SUICIDE PREVENTION 
While an app alone cannot save lives, it can be a good resource to go along with counseling and mental health lifelines, like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 988, and Trevor Lifeline 866-488-7386.

MY3 is free and helps those stay safe while having thoughts of suicide. It lets you customize your own personal safety plan by noting your warning signs, listing coping strategies, and connecting you to helpful resources to reach out to when you need them most. At your fingertips is a button that puts you in direct contact (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) with a trained counselor from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline as well as a 911 alert. Additionally, you can choose three people to contact in the event you’re having thoughts of suicide. 

 

notOK is a free app developed by a struggling teenager (and her teen brother) for teenagers. The app features a large, red button that can be activated to let close friends, family and their support network know help is needed. Users can add up to five trusted contacts as part of their support group so when they hit the digital panic button, a message along with their current GPS location is sent to their contacts. The message reads: “Hey, I’m not OK! Please call, text, or come find me.”