For how we live.
A survey of seven countries found the youth mental health app market dominated by paid journaling and meditation apps. The AI-powered ones show early promise on symptoms — and none had checked for harm.
Across 34 trials, mindfulness apps produced small effects on stress, anxiety and depression, and none on general distress. A 2026 review confirms they can help without a facilitator — at low certainty.
Most wellness apps make no disease claim and face no federal review. Into that gap, US states are writing their own AI-in-mental-health laws — four already diverge, leaving users unevenly protected.
A review of 110 studies found that 52% of trialled self-guided apps were publicly available — and that evidence quality had no bearing on which ones made it to an app store.
Pooled across 48 trials, chatbots cut depression, anxiety and stress by small amounts. But a review of purpose-built mental health chatbots found crisis-referral protocols underdeveloped and missed suicidal ideation.
The largest syntheses find apps beat doing nothing on depression and anxiety by about a third of a standard deviation — but the edge shrinks against real treatment, and one umbrella review found no convincing proof.
A meta-regression of 169 trials coded 34 therapeutic ingredients. The most common — psychoeducation, relaxation, mindfulness — were not the ones that best predicted getting better.