JMIR Mental Health
Internet interventions, technologies, and digital innovations for mental health and behavior change.
JMIR Mental Health is the official journal of the Society of Digital Psychiatry.
Editor-in-Chief:
John Torous, MD, MBI, Harvard Medical School, USA
Impact Factor 6.33
Recent Articles


Low engagement rates with digital mental health interventions are a major challenge in the field. Multicomponent digital interventions aim to improve engagement by adding components such as social networks. Although social networks may be engaging, they may not be sufficient to improve clinical outcomes or lead users to engage with key therapeutic components. Therefore, we need to understand what components drive engagement with digital mental health interventions overall and what drives engagement with key therapeutic components.


Mental crises have high prevalences in adolescence. Early interventions appear to be highly important to diminish the risk of the deterioration, recurrence, or chronification of symptoms. In recent years, various providers have started offering live chat support in psychological crises. The messenger-based psychological counseling service krisenchat aims to support young people in crises and, if necessary, provide a recommendation for a referral to the health care system or to seek further help from a trusted adult person.

Mental disorders are prevalent during adolescence. Among the digital phenotypes currently being developed to monitor mental health symptoms, typing behavior is one promising candidate. However, few studies have directly assessed associations between typing behavior and mental health symptom severity, and whether these relationships differs between genders.

Extant gaps in mental health services are intensified among first-generation college students. Improving access to empirically based interventions is critical, and mobile health (mHealth) interventions are growing in support. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an empirically supported intervention that has been applied to college students, via mobile app, and in brief intervals.




Literature has underscored the dark aspects of social media use, including associations with depressive symptoms, feelings of social isolation, and diminished self-esteem. Social comparison, the process of evaluating oneself relative to another person, is thought to contribute to these negative experiences such that people with a stronger tendency to compare themselves with others are particularly susceptible to the detrimental effects of social media. Social media as a form of social connection and communication is nevertheless an inevitable—and arguably integral—part of life, particularly for young adults. Therefore, there is a need to investigate strategies that could alter the manner in which people interact with social media to minimize its detrimental effects and maximize the feelings of affiliation and connection.

Acceptability of digital mental health interventions is a significant predictor of treatment-seeking behavior and engagement. However, acceptability has been conceptualized and operationalized in various ways, which decreases measurement precision and leads to heterogeneous conclusions about acceptability. Standardized self-report measures of acceptability have been developed, which have the potential to ameliorate these problems, but none have demonstrated evidence for validation among Black communities, which limits our understanding of attitudes toward these interventions among racially minoritized groups with well-documented barriers to mental health treatment.

This paper reintroduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), 4 years and 10,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ naturalistic smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS’s capabilities—the most important of which is the expansion of EARS to the iOS operating system. Other improvements include better keyboard integration for the collection of typed text; full control of survey design and administration for research teams; and the addition of a researcher-facing EARS dashboard, which facilitates survey design, the enrollment of participants, and the tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe 3 challenges faced by the EARS developers—remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running in the background, and continuous attention and effort toward data protection—and how those challenges shaped the design of the app.