JMIR Mental Health

Increasing rates of mental health diagnoses in college students signal the need for new opportunities to support the mental health of this population. With many mental health apps being efficacious, they may be a promising resource for college campuses to provide support to their students. However, it is important to understand why (or why not) students might want to use apps and their desired features.

A growing body of evidence for digital interventions to improve sleep shows promising effects. The interventions investigated so far have been primarily web-based; however, app-based interventions may reach a wider audience and be more suitable for daily use.

Depression and anxiety contribute to an estimated 74.6 million years of life with disability, and 80% of this burden occurs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where there is a large gap in care.

A mental health crisis can create challenges for individuals, families, and communities. This multifaceted issue often involves different professionals from law enforcement and health care systems, which may lead to siloed and suboptimal care. The virtual crisis care (VCC) program was developed to provide rural law enforcement with access to behavioral health professionals and facilitated collaborative care via telehealth technology.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is treatable and preventable, but most women do not seek professional help for their perinatal depressive symptoms. One increasingly popular approach of improving access to care is the use of web-based intervention programs.

Social interactions are important for well-being, and therefore, researchers are increasingly attempting to capture people’s social environment. Many different disciplines have developed tools to measure the social environment, which can be highly variable over time. The experience sampling method (ESM) is often used in psychology to study the dynamics within a person and the social environment. In addition, passive sensing is often used to capture social behavior via sensors from smartphones or other wearable devices. Furthermore, sociologists use egocentric networks to track how social relationships are changing. Each of these methods is likely to tap into different but important parts of people’s social environment. Thus far, the development and implementation of these methods have occurred mostly separately from each other.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought digital practices and engagement to the forefront of society, which were based on behavioral changes associated with adhering to different government mandates. Further behavioral changes included transitioning from working in the office to working from home, with the use of various social media and communication platforms to maintain a level of social connectedness, especially given that many people who were living in different types of communities, such as rural, urban, and city spaces, were socially isolated from friends, family members, and community groups. Although there is a growing body of research exploring how technology is being used by people, there is limited information and insight about the digital practices employed across different age cohorts living in different physical spaces and residing in different countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions have been a major stressor that has exacerbated mental health worldwide. Qualitative data play a unique role in documenting mental states through both language features and content. Text analysis methods can provide insights into the associations between language use and mental health and reveal relevant themes that emerge organically in open-ended responses.

An increasing number of psychological interventions are shifting to online modes of delivery. One such intervention is peer-to-peer support, which in this context may provide internet users living with mental health disorders an opportunity to connect with and support others living with similar conditions. This paper presents a call for further research into how platforms such as Facebook could be used as channels for peer support and the mechanisms that may underlie their effectiveness. We discuss the background of peer support, how it has transitioned online, and consider theories and models that may have relevance. We also consider the importance of moderation within online peer support and the development of specific social network–based online interventions. We conclude that for social network sites to be used as peer-to-peer support interventions, more research is needed to understand their effectiveness, the role of moderation in these communities, and the mechanisms that produce the benefits experienced by users.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to examine social media and technology use during a time in which technology served as adolescents’ primary form of socialization. The literature is mixed regarding how increased screen time during this period affected adolescent mental health and well-being. The mechanisms by which screen time use affected adolescent psychosocial outcomes are also unknown.

To contextualize the benefits of an intervention, it is important that adverse events (AEs) are reported. This is potentially difficult in trials of digital mental health interventions, where delivery may be remote and the mechanisms of actions less understood.

Despite the proliferation of evidence-based digital mental health programs for young people, their low uptake and inconsistent implementation preclude them from benefiting youths at scale. Identifying effective implementation strategies for evidence-based supports is especially critical in regions where treatment access is lowest owing to mental health provider shortages.