Can Mental Health Apps Work for Depression?
Today’s more than 20,000 mental health apps have a wide range of functionalities and business models. Many of them can be useful for depression.
Even before the pandemic created a need for more telehealth options, depression was a hot area of research for app developers. Given the high prevalence of depression and its connection to suicidality — especially among today’s teenagers and young adults who grew up with mobile devices, use them often, and experience these conditions with alarming frequency — apps for depression could be not only useful but lifesaving.
“For people who are not depressed, but have been depressed in the past, the apps can be helpful for maintaining positive thinking and behaviors,” said Andrea K. Wittenborn, PhD, director of the Couple and Family Therapy Doctoral Program and a professor in human development and family studies at Michigan State University. “For people who are mildly to severely depressed, apps can be a useful complement to working with a mental health professional.”
Health and fitness apps, in general, number in the hundreds of thousands. These are driving a market expected to reach $102.45 billion by next year. The mobile mental health app market is a small part of this but still sizable at $500 million, with revenues generated through user health insurance, employers, and direct payments from individuals.
Apps can provide data that health professionals cannot gather on their own. People’s constant interaction with smartphones and wearable devices yields data on many health conditions for millions of patients in their natural environments and while they go about their usual activities. Compared with the in-office measurements of weight and blood pressure and the brevity of doctor-patient interactions, the thousands of data points gathered unobtrusively over an extended time period provide a far better and more detailed picture of the person and their health.
At their most advanced level, apps for mental health, including depression, passively gather data on how the user touches and interacts with the mobile device through changes in digital biomarkers that relate to depressive symptoms and other conditions.
Building on three decades of research since early “apps” were used for delivering treatment manuals to health professionals, today’s more than 20,000 mental health apps have a wide range of functionalities and business models. Many of these apps can be useful for depression.
Some apps primarily provide a virtual connection to a group of mental health professionals employed or contracted by the app. Others have options for meditation, sleeping or, in the case of industry leaders Calm and Headspace, overall well-being. On the cutting edge are apps that detect changes in a person’s use of mobile devices and their interactions with them.
Apps such as AbleTo, Happify Health, and Woebot Health focus on cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of counseling with proven potential to change a person’s behaviors and feelings. “CBT has been demonstrated in innumerable studies over the last several decades to be effective in the treatment of behavioral health conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders,” said Dr. Reena Pande, chief medical officer at AbleTo. “CBT is intended to be delivered as a structured intervention incorporating key elements, including behavioral activation and adaptive thinking strategies.”
These CBT skills help break the negative self-talk (rumination) common in patients with depression. They are taught and reinforced by some self-guided apps, using either artificial intelligence or programmed interactions with users. Apps can address loneliness and isolation through connections with others, even when a symptomatic person doesn’t feel like leaving the house.
At their most advanced level, apps for mental health, including depression, passively gather data on how the user touches and interacts with the mobile device through changes in “digital biomarkers” that can be associated with onset or worsening of depressive symptoms and other cognitive conditions. In one study, Mindstrong Health gathered a year’s worth of data on how people use their smartphones, such as scrolling through articles, typing and clicking. Mindstrong, whose founders include former leaders of the National Institutes of Health, modeled the timing and order of these actions to make assessments that correlated closely with gold-standard tests of cognitive function.
National organizations of mental health professionals have been following the expanding number of available apps over the years with keen interest. App Advisor is an initiative of the American Psychiatric Association that helps psychiatrists and other mental health professionals navigate the issues raised by mobile health technology. App Advisor does not rate or recommend particular apps but rather provides guidance about why apps should be assessed and how health professionals can do this.
A website that does review mental health apps is One Mind Psyber Guide, an independent nonprofit that partners with several national organizations. One Mind users can select among numerous search terms for the condition and therapeutic approach of interest. Apps are rated on a five-point scale, with reviews written by professionals in the field.
Do mental health apps related to depression have the kind of safety and effectiveness data required for medications and other medical interventions? Not always — and not often. Yet the overall results have shown early promise, Wittenborn noted.
“Studies that have attempted to detect depression from smartphone and wearable sensors [during a single session] have ranged in accuracy from about 86 to 89 percent,” Wittenborn said. “Studies that tried to predict changes in depression over time have been less accurate, with accuracy ranging from 59 to 85 percent.”
The Food and Drug Administration encourages the development of apps and has approved a few of them—mostly ones used by health professionals—but it is generally “hands off,” according to the American Psychiatric Association. The FDA has published a list of examples of software (including programming of apps) that it does not plan to regulate because they pose low risk to the public. First on the list is software that helps patients with diagnosed psychiatric conditions, including depression, maintain their behavioral coping skills by providing a “Skill of the Day” technique or message.
On its App Advisor site, the American Psychiatric Association says mental health apps can be dangerous or cause harm in multiple ways, such as by providing false information, overstating the app’s therapeutic value, selling personal data without clearly notifying users, and collecting data that isn’t relevant to mental health.
Although there is currently reason for caution, patients may eventually come to expect mental health professionals to recommend apps, especially as their rating systems, features and capabilities expand. Through such apps, patients might experience more and higher quality interactions with their mental health professionals. “Apps will continue to be refined and become more effective through future research,” said Wittenborn. “They will become more integrated into practice over time.”
Catching colds may help protect kids from Covid
A new study shows that the immune system's response to colds can help prepare it to defend against COVID-19 - but only in the very young.
A common cold virus causes the immune system to produce T cells that also provide protection against SARS-CoV-2, according to new research. The study, published last month in PNAS, shows that this effect is most pronounced in young children. The finding may help explain why most young people who have been exposed to the cold-causing coronavirus have not developed serious cases of COVID-19.
One curiosity stood out in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic – why were so few kids getting sick. Generally young children and the elderly are the most vulnerable to disease outbreaks, particularly viral infections, either because their immune systems are not fully developed or they are starting to fail.
But solid information on the new infection was so scarce that many public health officials acted on the precautionary principle, assumed a worst-case scenario, and applied the broadest, most restrictive policies to all people to try to contain the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
One early thought was that lockdowns worked and kids (ages 6 months to 17 years) simply were not being exposed to the virus. So it was a shock when data started to come in showing that well over half of them carried antibodies to the virus, indicating exposure without getting sick. That trend grew over time and the latest tracking data from the CDC shows that 96.3 percent of kids in the U.S. now carry those antibodies.
Antibodies are relatively quick and easy to measure, but some scientists are exploring whether the reactions of T cells could serve as a more useful measure of immune protection.
But that couldn't be the whole story because antibody protection fades, sometimes as early as a month after exposure and usually within a year. Additionally, SARS-CoV-2 has been spewing out waves of different variants that were more resistant to antibodies generated by their predecessors. The resistance was so significant that over time the FDA withdrew its emergency use authorization for a handful of monoclonal antibodies with earlier approval to treat the infection because they no longer worked.
Antibodies got most of the attention early on because they are part of the first line response of the immune system. Antibodies can bind to viruses and neutralize them, preventing infection. They are relatively quick and easy to measure and even manufacture, but as SARS-CoV-2 showed us, often viruses can quickly evolve to become more resistant to them. Some scientists are exploring whether the reactions of T cells could serve as a more useful measure of immune protection.
Kids, colds and T cells
T cells are part of the immune system that deals with cells once they have become infected. But working with T cells is much more difficult, takes longer, and is more expensive than working with antibodies. So studies often lags behind on this part of the immune system.
A group of researchers led by Annika Karlsson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden focuses on T cells targeting virus-infected cells and, unsurprisingly, saw that they can play a role in SARS-CoV-2 infection. Other labs have shown that vaccination and natural exposure to the virus generates different patterns of T cell responses.
The Swedes also looked at another member of the coronavirus family, OC43, which circulates widely and is one of several causes of the common cold. The molecular structure of OC43 is similar to its more deadly cousin SARS-CoV-2. Sometimes a T cell response to one virus can produce a cross-reactive response to a similar protein structure in another virus, meaning that T cells will identify and respond to the two viruses in much the same way. Karlsson looked to see if T cells for OC43 from a wide age range of patients were cross-reactive to SARS-CoV-2.
And that is what they found, as reported in the PNAS study last month; there was cross-reactive activity, but it depended on a person’s age. A subset of a certain type of T cells, called mCD4+,, that recognized various protein parts of the cold-causing virus, OC43, expressed on the surface of an infected cell – also recognized those same protein parts from SARS-CoV-2. The T cell response was lower than that generated by natural exposure to SARS-CoV-2, but it was functional and thus could help limit the severity of COVID-19.
“One of the most politicized aspects of our pandemic response was not accepting that children are so much less at risk for severe disease with COVID-19,” because usually young children are among the most vulnerable to pathogens, says Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
“The cross-reactivity peaked at age six when more than half the people tested have a cross-reactive immune response,” says Karlsson, though their sample is too small to say if this finding applies more broadly across the population. The vast majority of children as young as two years had OC43-specific mCD4+ T cell responses. In adulthood, the functionality of both the OC43-specific and the cross-reactive T cells wane significantly, especially with advanced age.
“Considering that the mortality rate in children is the lowest from ages five to nine, and higher in younger children, our results imply that cross-reactive mCD4+ T cells may have a role in the control of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children,” the authors wrote in their paper.
“One of the most politicized aspects of our pandemic response was not accepting that children are so much less at risk for severe disease with COVID-19,” because usually young children are among the most vulnerable to pathogens, says Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and author of the book, Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook, to be released by the Mayo Clinic Press this summer. The immune response of kids to SARS-CoV-2 stood our expectations on their head. “We just haven't seen this before, so knowing the mechanism of protection is really important.”
Why the T cell immune response can fade with age is largely unknown. With some viruses such as measles, a single vaccination or infection generates life-long protection. But respiratory tract infections, like SARS-CoV-2, cause a localized infection - specific to certain organs - and that response tends to be shorter lived than systemic infections that affect the entire body. Karlsson suspects the elderly might be exposed to these localized types of viruses less often. Also, frequent continued exposure to a virus that results in reactivation of the memory T cell pool might eventually result in “a kind of immunosenescence or immune exhaustion that is associated with aging,” Karlsson says. https://leaps.org/scientists-just-started-testing-a-new-class-of-drugs-to-slow-and-even-reverse-aging/particle-3 This fading protection is why older people need to be repeatedly vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2.
Policy implications
Following the numbers on COVID-19 infections and severity over the last three years have shown us that healthy young people without risk factors are not likely to develop serious disease. This latest study points to a mechanism that helps explain why. But the inertia of existing policies remains. How should we adjust policy recommendations based on what we know today?
The World Health Organization (WHO) updated their COVID-19 vaccination guidance on March 28. It calls for a focus on vaccinating and boosting those at risk for developing serious disease. The guidance basically shrugged its shoulders when it came to healthy children and young adults receiving vaccinations and boosters against COVID-19. It said the priority should be to administer the “traditional essential vaccines for children,” such as those that protect against measles, rubella, and mumps.
“As an immunologist and a mother, I think that catching a cold or two when you are a kid and otherwise healthy is not that bad for you. Children have a much lower risk of becoming severely ill with SARS-CoV-2,” says Karlsson. She has followed public health guidance in Sweden, which means that her young children have not been vaccinated, but being older, she has received the vaccine and boosters. Gandhi and her children have been vaccinated, but they do not plan on additional boosters.
The WHO got it right in “concentrating on what matters,” which is getting traditional childhood immunizations back on track after their dramatic decline over the last three years, says Gandhi. Nor is there a need for masking in schools, according to a study from the Catalonia region of Spain. It found “no difference in masking and spread in schools,” particularly since tracking data indicate that nearly all young people have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
Both researchers lament that public discussion has overemphasized the quickly fading antibody part of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 compared with the more durable T cell component. They say developing an efficient measure of T cell response for doctors to use in the clinic would help to monitor immunity in people at risk for severe cases of COVID-19 compared with the current method of toting up potential risk factors.
In this week's Friday Five: The eyes are the windows to the soul - and biological aging?
Plus, what bean genes mean for health and the planet, a breathing practice that could lower levels of tau proteins in the brain, AI beats humans at assessing heart health, and the benefits of "nature prescriptions"
The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on new scientific theories and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.
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Here are the stories covered this week:
- The eyes are the windows to the soul - and biological aging?
- What bean genes mean for health and the planet
- This breathing practice could lower levels of tau proteins
- AI beats humans at assessing heart health
- Should you get a nature prescription?