What's Up? A Mental Health App for Pc

Love love love it. I've suffered from depression and anxiety for years. Many mental health apps have come and gone but I've kept this one consistently (longer than almost any other) since it offers such quick, clear help. I use it mostly for anxiety for quick help, for my depression for more general help. When you're really freaking out (or just a bit!) this is the easiest one I've found to get quick help where I don't have to think too much about how to use the app itself in order to let it help me. Open the app, top choice is "Help Right Now" - so simple! Click it and the choice is equally clear "Stop!" Click that and it walks you through a short series of actions to calm you down and bring you back to reality. So many of the others are too wordy or too many bells and whistles; you can’t find your way around or if I do find my way usually it’s difficult to find the helpful parts again, esp. if I’m really in crisis. When I'm not in a crisis, the rest of the app is equally helpful and gives lots of clear good ideas of techniques for overall feeling better. Keep up the good work you guys and thank you so so so much for all many times of this app's support and calming me down and helping me back to reality.

I am giving a explanation because I think I’m not the only one that avoids mental health apps and want to reassure them that this app is nothing like any of the other apps. Also as a genuine thank you to the developer 🙏 Nothing is worse than thinking something can help you just to find out it is filled with “live love laugh”, “you’re special”, “omg mercury in retrograde”. That’s all nice but it is shallow and unhelpful. Some apps with breathing exercises and cutesy quotes really make me feel invalidated and that feeling better is just as easy as namaste. That if you just say the word “positive” over and over nothing bad will ever happen. So when I found this app I was sooooo happy. I share it with anyone overwhelmed by their mental state and especially when they had little resources available. I have severe anxiety attacks from PTSD and this app has saved my life. It is clear the developer is a professional and is focused on helping people get grounded and understand their emotions on a deeper level. Sometimes there is just no level of advice that takes the intensity of an emotion away. Sometimes you are just going to feel but this helped me through that in one piece and educated me on how to identify what I need.

Provides easy and immediate access to coping strategies and techniques that users can rely when experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Users are give information to understand their feelings and emotions, as well as ways they can break the cycle of feeling this way. However, forums should be better controlled. Anyone can post anything, which can be hurtful to users, especially teens. Although it is said that the app is for anyone that is 4 years old and older, children that do not know how to read will not be able to use it. Individuals that are visually impaired will not be able to use it either. An interesting point that was made by Steinberg (2014) is that the pain that adolescence experience when they are social rejected “closely resembles physical pain in neurological terms that taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, actually can help alleviate it” (95). Being socially rejected is a painful experience for teens that can definitely make things worse for those that are already struggling. Based on the review criteria above and my own experience with What’s Up, I would rate this app a 3 out 5. What’s Up has many different coping strategies and techniques that users can access whenever they are in need of it. However, individuals can post whatever they want on the forums that can potentially harm users.

The most dynamic component of this app is its active forum receiving posts from users every couple of minutes. As Murphy writes in her article on teens usage of social network sites (SNS), “SNSs can be used to help adolescents form an identity…When used correctly and monitored well by parents or adults, adolescents can effectively use SNSs to explore themselves and construct identity (Murphy, 2013, pg. 4). This particular forum site may not be the safest kind of SNS available for adolescents. The purpose of this forum is for users to chat with others experiencing struggles similar to them, and there are various categories a post can fall under like seeking advice, rant, asking for help and other but there no safeguards, like app moderators, in place currently to protect vulnerable population, like teens, from experiencing the negative side of anonymous posting. This can result in further damage being done to an adolescent’s identity formation and the learning inappropriate coping skills to dealing with their emotions. Source: Murphy, L. S., Lancy, K., & Hertlein, K. M. (2013). Attending to Social Network Usage in Teen and Family Treatment: A Structural-Developmental Approach. Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 24(3), 173–187.