New Delhi: Two years of the pandemic has led to a renewed focus on mental health. Issues related to mental health that remained under wraps are now out in the open with greater acceptance and acknowledgement. Experts, society and even the government are working towards finding solutions. There are numerous platforms to address the issue including apps.
Indian apps for mental health such as ‘Evolve’, ‘being’ and ‘jumpminds.AI’ are increasingly becoming popular. All three were ranked among the top in Google Play’s ‘Best of’ Awards for 2021.
According to Anshul Kamath, Evolve’s founder, awareness about mental health has gone up significantly during the pandemic. “Earlier, mental health used to be seen as something synonymous with mental illness such as depression. However, today everyone realises that just like we focus on our physical health, we also need to take care of our mental health regularly,” he told indianexpress.com.
All three apps have a different approach.
Evolve
It helps users with their mental well-being through interactive content based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Users can work on a specific problem they face using the app. It has close to 100,000 users from across the world and relies on a freemium model with a mix of free and premium elements. Some of the content is free forever, though it also offers an annual and monthly subscription.
“Someone going through a breakup or a burnout has sessions contextualised to the specific problem they are facing. These virtual sessions are interactive and designed to simulate how a therapist or a life coach would work with them in person. Apart from this, users can also do bite-sized practices every day for their daily self-care and mental wellbeing,” Kamath told indianexpress.com. The app has a proprietary interactive interface, designed to simulate in-person sessions conducted by a therapist or a life coach.
jumpingMinds.ai (jM)
It is entirely free and is designed more for everyday stress. It is more about users finding and talking to their peers about common problems. “Unlike the majority of players who employ a therapy-first strategy, jumpingMinds has adopted a user-first approach to make wellness easy, accessible, and fun. It’s a first-of-its-kind community platform empowered by deep technology that offers an anonymous safe space,” Ariba Khan, the founder and CEO of Jumping Minds was quoted as saying.
According to her, one of the challenges with mental health and wellness is the low user retention along with the high stigma and lack of mental health professionals. The idea of the app is to create “an interactive, secure and empathetic network of friends” who will listen to the user and support them.
‘being’
More than 65 per cent of the audience is in the Gen-Z age group. A majority of its users have never done any kind of therapy or are not yet considering the same, according to its founder and it is this gap they want to fill. The app also offers sessions called mini-therapies, which are bite-sized interactive sessions on how one feels at the moment. These mini-sessions help users truly identify how they feel and why they are confused about their feelings.
It also claims to have better diversity in the audience and has 65 per cent of women users, while 60 per cent of users are based outside India, primarily in the US and the UK. Anxiety and stress, relationships, depression, focus and productivity, loneliness, and sleep were the top 5 broad-level issues that the ‘being’ app helped address. While the app will be free for the first four months of 2022, it too plans to start with monthly and annual subscription fee models.
