Systematic review and meta-analysis finds uncertain effectiveness of mobile applications for depressive symptoms in youth, highlighting the need to evaluate specific app-delivered therapy types.
Among youth, symptoms of depression, anxiety, and alcohol use are associated with considerable illness and disability. Youth face many personal and health system barriers in accessing mental health care. Mobile applications (apps) offer youth potentially accessible, scalable, and anonymous therapy and other support. Recent systematic reviews on apps to reduce mental health symptoms among youth have reported uncertain effectiveness, but analyses based on the type of app-delivered therapy are limited.
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Magwood et al. (2024) studied this question.
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