10 Best Mental Health Apps of 2024

Mental health apps are smartphone apps that are designed to support your emotional well-being in some way. Some focus on mindfulness or meditation while others provide strategies to help you deal with specific conditions (such as anxiety or phobias) and others connect you with mental health professionals for therapy.

Some mental health apps are completely free while some charge weekly, monthly, annually or one-time fees, and others require you to pay per therapy session.

It depends on the app, but there are many reasons why using one might be beneficial for your mental health.

1. They can be a form of prevention or early intervention. Say, for example, you’re suffering from insomnia. “If you’re noticing that maybe you’re having a little trouble sleeping, but it’s not every night, but you feel like being present and mindful might be helpful, and you could start to use an app,” says Luana Marques, Ph.D., a psychotherapist, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of Bold Move. “When you start to go from ‘I’m a little anxious’ or ‘I’m a little sad’ to ‘It’s causing real interference and/or distress’ — you’re having trouble sleeping, and you can’t focus on your job the majority of the time, or you’re finding that your worries are getting in the way — that’s the tilting point.” At that point, you’re better off talking to a mental health professional.
2. They can help you practice healthy behaviors. “A lot of them right now are either mindfulness-based or cognitive therapy-based, and they’re going to either teach you how to be in the present moment or observe your negative thinking, restructure your thinking or shift your thinking,” says Marques. “I think about this as good exercise for the brain. If we go to the gym, we are exercising our physical bodies. I think the apps have the ability to exercise our brain in a way that can be very helpful.”
3. They are especially useful for mindfulness. “The primary things that I’ve found are helpful from the apps for anxiety are these meditation apps — things that teach people who to drop out of their mind and down into the body and into the breathing and into presence,” says Nancy Colier, LCSW, a psychotherapist, interfaith minister and the author of five books including Can’t Stop Thinking. “It’s not just reframing and working with the anxious thoughts,” she explains. “It’s actually learning to meditate and learning to live a bit differently. That really significantly does help people with anxiety.”
4. They can provide a way to monitor symptoms. “They give you very specific hands-on ways of tracking,” says Colier. “They’re particularly useful in things like CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) or identifying triggering thoughts and very practical things. They’re wonderful for keeping track of accountable habits.” This allows you to spot patterns, identify what you can control and then employ tactics to change course.
5. They may be a first step towards therapy. This is especially true for apps that connect you virtually with a mental health professional. “I think for a person who just won’t get to therapy — and there are many people who won’t reach out to a therapist — it can be a first step because it feels like a private and confidential place that maybe they couldn’t get themselves to do with another human,” says Colier. “I’m all for meeting people where they are. If that gets the conversation and the curiosity in you going, then that’s a beautiful place to start.”

They can be! “There is so much research in randomized control trials on the value of mindfulness, for example,” says Marques. “We know that being in the present moment — paying attention non-judgmentally — can really help. You can do that by observing scenery, you can do that by listening to a meditation, and you can do that by listening to some of those apps.” However, there are fewer studies about the efficacy of specific apps. For instance, cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to help with insomnia, but there isn’t much data to show certain apps that use CBT will help reduce insomnia.

One thing to consider is how often you plan to engage with a mental health app. “I think patients tend to not use it a lot — sort of like signing up for the gym but never showing up,” says Marques. “Research shows that engagement drops pretty quickly.” That means an app could be very helpful with the psychological issues you’re facing, but it probably won’t be effective if you only use it once a week.

Lastly, think about what your overall goal is and if an app can help you reach that goal instead of veering you off course. “While these may be targeted to mitigate suffering and anxiety and depression and all the chronic conditions of 2023, spending more time with our phones and devices is completely contradictory to well-being,” says Colier. “What I tell people who are my clients is to go in the world. Have a conversation. Take a walk. Engage with nature. Help someone. Talk to someone in the grocery store. Take a ride on a bus. What we need as human beings is community. We need meaning. We need to be engaged in the world — not to be staring into our devices.”

“They’re best used as a supplement to a relationship with a real therapist, and for that they can certainly be quite useful,” says Colier. “They help people stay connected between sessions to their therapy.” Think of talk therapy with a mental health professional as the gold standard and then these apps as things you can use to make that talk therapy even more effective by helping you practice skills between sessions. “So much of what works in therapy is this empathetic relationship with a human and the vulnerability that that involves,” says Colier. “Some of the apps are just games and ways of tracking and behavioral approaches, which is fine to add to your normal approach, but ultimately I don’t think that’s enough on its own.”

One reason why working with a real human is superior is because many apps focus on one aspect of mental health (such as anxiety or sleep issues), but these apps can’t provide a well-rounded approach to address overlapping symptoms and conditions or dig into how your past might be affecting your experiences today. “Truth be told, the magic of therapy is not the magic of therapy. It’s something that happens underneath,” says Colier. “It’s the experience of having someone essentially who cares about you and understands you and can really, unconditionally hear you without judgment. This is the nectar of real therapy. It’s love.”

It depends on an app’s individual privacy policy. Unfortunately, “we don’t have that many safeguards in place in terms of who’s monitoring this,” says Colier. “When you’re looking for something, you want to make sure that you check out the privacy of it. Where’s your information going? This is private information that you’re sharing, and you want to make sure that you understand that it’s confidential, and it’s not being sold to insurance companies or whomever.” Yes, it’s annoying, and it takes time, but before you automatically accept the terms and conditions that an app serves up, carefully read through the details of the privacy policy to ensure you’re comfortable with how it handles private details. Remember, it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with mental health information so when possible, opt for an app that doesn't share your personal data with outside entities.

To give you all the information you need to select a mental health app that you can depend on, we scoured reviews in the Apple and Android app stores, got recommendations from psychotherapists, reached out to companies for clarification about the features provided by their apps and with many of the apps listed above, we downloaded and tested them out ourselves. Remember, what works for one person may not work for the next so keep an open mind, don’t be afraid to try a few different apps and most importantly, reach out to a therapist if you’re seriously struggling with a mental health issue. “If you find yourself stuck, avoiding again and again, moving away from things that make you anxious, and it’s interfering with your life, that’s when it’s time to seek help,” says Marques.

Kaitlyn Phoenix is a senior editor in the Health Newsroom at Hearst, where she reports, writes and edits research-backed health content for Good Housekeeping, Prevention and Woman's Day. She has more than 10 years of experience talking to top medical professionals and poring over studies to figure out the science of how our bodies work. She then turns what she learns into easy-to-read stories about medical conditions, nutrition, fitness and mental health. For this story, she interviewed two mental health professionals and then spent many hours testing mental health apps on her own phone, evaluating reviews of them on other sites and in the app store and talking to each of the companies to make sure we had the most accurate and up-to-date details. After all that, she had a psychologist review the story so we can be confident all of the information here is solid.