Mental health app review

Clients arrive with apps they want to add to their care, or ask the therapist to recommend one. The mental health app market is enormous, the marketing is sophisticated, the evidence base for most products is thin, and the privacy practices range from acceptable to actively harmful. A clinician recommending or signing off on an app is taking on something close to clinical responsibility for what the app does next, which makes a structured review worth doing rather than skipping.

This worksheet is the structured review. Usability, likely effectiveness for the client’s therapeutic goal, personalisation, feedback, evidence base, developer credentials, privacy policy, data portability. Each rated or answered explicitly rather than glossed over. The point isn’t to disqualify every app. It’s to make the decision deliberate.

Use it any time a client asks “should I use this app” or “have you heard of this one.” Run it together in session the first time you do it, so the client learns what kind of questions matter. After that they can run reviews on their own and bring the data to session for a quick conversation. Most clients come back with a clearer sense of why some apps were obvious passes and why others might be worth trying.

The clinical pattern to watch for is the most dangerous one. Apps that score high on ease and personalisation but low on research evidence and privacy. Those are the most heavily marketed apps and the most likely to do harm, especially for clients logging sensitive content (trauma timelines, suicidality, eating-disorder behaviours). The privacy section is the dealbreaker for those clients. An app with no clear privacy policy that collects mood and trauma data is not a tool, it’s a leak waiting to happen.

A second pattern: apps that score well on every dimension except evidence base. Those are usually competent products solving the wrong problem. A polished app for sleep hygiene might be excellent for sleep hygiene, but if the client is signing up because they want to address social anxiety, the app is the wrong fit even though the rating profile is strong.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it before the client commits to using a new app, with a personal message that names the specific app under review. Submissions save in the case file as the client’s documented decision, which can be revisited if the app turns out to do harm or to fall short of what was promised.