Can AI-Powered Mental Health Apps Meaningfully Improve Wellbeing?
Research by FOS Affiliate Raissa Fabregas and co-authors on how AI-powered mental health apps can improve users' wellbeing, daily functioning, labour market outcomes, and their engagement with formal care.
Can a mental health app on your phone sustainably improve psychological wellbeing? New evidence from Mexico suggests that it can. 1,964 women experiencing at least mild psychological distress were offered free access to Mindsurf, an AI-powered well-being app based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles.
Over six months, app access improved mental health by about 0.3 standard deviations. It reduced moderate-or-higher depression by 12.6 percentage points and moderate-or-higher anxiety by 8.7 percentage points – roughly one-fifth lower than in the control group. Users also slept more, went out more often, spent less heavy time on social media, and missed fewer days of work. These findings matter because access to formal mental health care remains limited despite the high prevalence of mental disorders.
This research is featured in VoxDev and in a subsequent Rockwool Foundation Berlin article, which provides additional discussion of the experimental findings, the persistence of benefits despite declining app use, and implications for evaluating digital mental health interventions.