How to protect consumers from a deregulated mental health digital app market

Protecting consumers from an ever-expanding market of digital mental health applications is becoming a necessity. The impact of this type of digital tool raises new ethical questions about safety, effectiveness, equity and sustainability in accessing mental health services, and companies need to be held accountable for creating this new type of tool.

The exponential emergence of digital health applications has not been accompanied by the corresponding development of quality assessment instruments, which could jeopardize their usefulness. The existence of instruments that can help in the development and choice of the most appropriate applications is indispensable as a way of mitigating the risks associated with the use of this type of solutions.

These tools can be used for self-monitoring and self-assessment, allowing users to better understand the relationships between behavior and their health, which can lead to greater autonomy and modification of individual behaviors.

The wide variety, availability and use of digital applications open up the potential for their use to support or even replace professional advice. The increased use of digital applications is seen as an accelerator in expanding the coverage of universal health services in the member states of the European Union, through increased access to quality health services, meeting the objective of sustainable development 3 of the United Nations.

There are over 10,000 mental health apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store alone. Many are not currently based on scientific evidence, putting users at significant risk in some cases. Deloitte analyzed 190 cases, revealing that 89% of apps are not clinically validated.

There are already proposed guidelines and tools to guide governments, regulators, healthcare, insurance, investors and digital mental health companies to work together to protect users in a post-Covid digital world. The aim is to encourage the safe, ethical and reliable implementation of digital mental health services by enabling all involved to understand the key components to consider to evaluate, build and integrate high quality services.

However, these efforts have not yet reached the common user who is faced with the responsibility of making a choice (often in a period of greater emotional/psychological fragility), without any mechanism that enables a selection that allows them to more easily assess the quality of mental health applications, helping them make more informed choices about their own mental health, and encouraging the strategic growth of safe, ethical, and effective digital mental health services.

This is also one of the challenges of the digital transition, empowering consumers to make the most informed choices possible in a context where the options are immense and navigating them sometimes transcends our time, patience or level of literacy that we possess.

The author signs this article as responsible for the relationship between psychology and technology in the Order of Portuguese Psychologists.