"Lie number one you're supposed
to have it all together
And when they ask how you're doing
Just smile and tell them, "Never better"
Lie number 2 everybody's
​ life is perfect except yours
So keep your messes and your wounds
And your secrets safe with you behind closed doors."
-Matthew West



​Mental Health Phone Apps

Depression

​Whats Up

What’s up is an amazing free app that uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) methods to help you cope with Depression, Anxiety, Stress, and more. Use the positive and negative habit tracker to maintain your good habits, and break those that are counterproductive. We particularly love the “Get Grounded” page, which contains over 100 different questions to pinpoint what you’re feeling, and the “Thinking Patterns” page, which teaches you how to stop negative internal monologues. Try it out for yourself.

Price: Free 
​
MoodKit

​This app will help individuals with depression, anxiety disorders, anger management issues, etc. The skills taught include self-monitoring, identifying and changing unhealthy thought patterns, and engaging in mood-enhancing activities.
It does a terrific job at making some of the general concepts of CBT available for people to work on by themselves or with the aid of a therapist. It would not be helpful to those with moderate to severe depression.

Price: $6.99

MoodTools

MoodTools is a self-help app targeting depression. It provides psychoeducation about risk factors and psychosocial approaches to treatment, a depression symptom questionnaire (PHQ-9), a thought diary, a suicide safety plan, and videos such as meditation guides.

​Price: Free

T2 Mood Tracker

Helps individuals track their emotional states and how they change over time for personal insight and accurate reporting to a mental health professional. The skills taught may be applied to individuals with depression, anxiety, stress, trauma-related feelings, any other self-identified emotional states, as well as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), chronic pain; customizable for sleep and other issues.
A graphing feature allows visual feedback for long time periods. Few to no interaction or "coaching tips”; links are not useful.

Price: Free

Daylio - Mood Tracker

Ever notice that your moods tend to fluctuate at certain times? Daylio can help you pinpoint these trends sooner so you can make the adjustments you need. Within the PIN-protected app, use graphics to detail your daily activities and moods, then watch the app churn out stats and trends to help you understand your mood better. Reminders ensure you keep up with your tracking and journaling activity.

Price: Free 

What's My M3

Your M3 score is a number to help you and your doctor understand if you have a treatable mood disorder. You can monitor your score to see how your mental health is changing over time. This app is targeted to help individuals rate various symptoms of mood disorders to determine the impact it may have on their functioning. This app may help those with major depression, bipolar, anxiety disorders and PTSD quickly determine if they need to speak to their primary care physician about a possible mental health condition that needs treatment.

Price: Free

CBT Thought Record Diary 

The centerpiece of cognitive-behavioral therapy is changing your emotions by identifying negative and distorted thinking patterns. You can use CBT Thought Record Diary to document negative emotions, analyze flaws in your thinking, and reevaluate your thoughts. This is a great app for gradually changing your approach to anxiety-inducing situations and your thinking patterns for future situations.

Price: Free 

Mood Mission 

Mood Mission is an evidenced based app designed to empower you to overcome feelings of depression and anxiety by discovering new and better ways of coping. 

Price: Free 

​Depression CBT Self Help Guide 

The Depression CBT Self-Help Guide provides education on depression and the best strategies for managing the symptoms. It encourages you to engage in self-care behaviors that can improve your mood. 
When you download the app, you’ll be able to complete a questionnaire that helps you identify the severity of your depression.
It provides basic information about depression and how to live well with depression. It addresses many of the common symptoms of depression, including the physical symptoms—such as low energy and sleep disturbances—which can be important factors to address if you want to feel better.
The app is based on cognitive behavioral therapy which has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression. You’ll learn simple relaxation strategies for reducing stress and you’ll discover how to change your thinking so you can reframe the thoughts that fuel your depression. 
Price: Free

TalkLife 

While mental health is becoming more visible, the stigma hasn’t dissolved completely. That can feel pretty isolating. For a safe space to talk openly about depression with others who get it, there’s TalkLife. It offers connection and community support similar to group therapy. A caring community of thousands of people is waiting to talk, listen, and help you feel a little less lonely. If you’re concerned about privacy, anonymous sharing is an option too.

Youper

App developers harnessed the power of artificial intelligence for good in this AI assistant for managing depression. Here’s how it works: Chat back and forth with your assistant, who asks prompts that encourage you to think about your thought patterns and behaviors. The app walks you through techniques you may need in the moment based on your responses. It then summarizes your conversations and interactions into insights that help you understand more about your emotional well-being.

Price: Free

Moodpath

Moodpath is one of the mental health apps that you can customize to help you manage anxiety, depression, and stress. 

Price: Free

Innerhour

Innerhour offers 6 self-help courses on:
Happiness: How to experience happiness in your life
Anger: How to channel your anger
Stress: How to manage stress
Depression: How to make small changes to beat depression
Sleep: How to develop sound sleep habits
Price: Free

Happy Not Perfect

This App features a Daily Happiness Workout, which is a quick 8-step routine to help you boost your feel-good hormones and relax anywhere. The workout features breathing and journaling exercises, as well as meditations, inspiring quotes to share, and mood tracking.

Price: Free 

MindShift CBT

MindShift CBT is another anxiety and depression app for anyone looking to engage with CBT. This one was developed by the non-profit charity Anxiety Disorders Association of British Columbia, and has a cool, calming user interface with CBT-based tools. There’s a Thought Journal for inputting negative thoughts and identifying problems, and then challenging them to ease anxiety. Another feature called Belief Experiments puts your anxieties underneath the proverbial microscope to test how well those worries face up to reality. But perhaps the most helpful feature are its Coping Cards, which help shake-up your mindset and re-align it using powerful coping statements that’ll ground you in all the benefits CBT can offer.

Price: Free 

Bipolar Disorder

IMoodJournal 

Part personal journal and part mood tracker, IMoodJournal can be used to record everything from mood and symptoms, to sleep, medications, and energy cycles. By tracking these various factors, you’re able to analyze your daily feelings through summary charts that indicate where your stress levels rise and fall.

Price: $2.99

emoods

eMoods is a mood tracking app designed specifically for people with bipolar disorder. Throughout the day, users can track depressive and psychotic symptoms, elevated mood, and irritability and give an indication of the severity of their symptoms. Users can then see their mood changes on a color-coded monthly calendar and even export a monthly summary report to identify specific triggers and better understand their fluctuating mood.

UP!

The UP! app is an automated mood diary that tracks and alerts you to your unique warning signs of depression and mania. The app has a daily journal feature to easily track your emotions and habits. You can manage, monitor and analyze signs of borderline personality disorder, depression and bipolar disorder.

Price: Free 

Anxiety

​Anxiety Reliever
​
​Anxiety Reliever is an app that enables users to track anxiety symptoms and provides relaxation exercises. A limited version of the app is available for free and the full app can be bought.

Price: Anxiety Reliever is free to download but with a $5.99 per month fee to upgrade.

Anxiety Coach

Anxiety Coach is a self-help app that addresses fears and worries using CBT strategies. The app walks you through making a list of feared activities and helps you master them, leading to less fear and worry. The app includes tools for a severity self-test, making a plan, anxiety tracking, and viewing your progress.

Price: $4.99

Breathe2Relax

A simple, intuitive, and attractive mobile app designed by the National Center for Telehealth & Technology to teach breathing techniques to manage stress. The skills taught may be applied to those with anxiety disorders, stress, and PTSD.

Price: Free

Happify

Happify is a self-guided app that aims to increase positive emotions through exercises and games supported by positive psychology and mindfulness research. An initial questionnaire is used to suggest "tracks" for an individual's use, and subsequent activity content is geared towards various aims such as reducing worry, building relationships, increasing fitness, or coping with chronic pain. Activities are backed up with a blurb about research or scientific rationale that the user is encouraged to read. It is free with paid upgrades.

Price: $10.99 - $19.99

iCBT App

The iCBT app provides a platform to identify, appraise and reappraise negative thoughts. Users are prompted to identify negative thoughts, rate their negative feelings, and identify cognitive distortions. It can be used as a standalone self-help app, however, because there is not psychoeducation or rationale provided, background knowledge in CBT or therapist-assisted delivery are recommended for it to be effective.

Price: $5.00 - $9.99

MindShift

Targeted to help adolescents, teens, and young adults gain insight into and basic skills to manage their symptoms of anxiety disorders, including GAD, social anxiety, specific phobias, and panic attacks. It’s also useful for managing worry, performance anxiety, test anxiety, and perfectionism. The skills taught may be applied to individuals with physical, emotional, cognitive, or behavioral manifestations of anxiety, providing users with more helpful, balanced ways of thinking about feared situations.

It does a terrific job of readily offering lists of active coping strategies tailored to the type of anxiety and a variety of methods to manage anxiety; the information and strategies are simple and clear. "Chill out" tools such as breathing exercises, mental imagery, and mindfulness strategies are provided in text and audio format. "Quick Tips" are included to assist with anxiety in the moment. Users can "favorite" the methods that work for them.  It is not helpful for people looking to track their symptoms and progress, those easily overwhelmed by many choices, or those with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Price: Free

Sanvello

Targeted to help those with anxiety and mood disorders and stress, this app teaches deep breathing, behavioral exercises, excises and identifying cognitive distortions (negative thinking patterns), and learning how to replace them with positive thinking patterns. It’s also good for those experiencing bouts of anxiety between treatment sessions. The app does a terrific job of personalizing one’s cause of anxiety using voice recordings, and introducing CBT and reinforcing exercises between therapist appointments. This app is designed to be used in conjunction with therapy, not as a substitute for professional treatment.

​Price: Free

Self-Help Anxiety Management

An app to help you understand what causes your anxiety, monitor your anxious thoughts and behavior over time, and manage them through self-help exercises and private reflection. The app is targeted to older teens and adults with anxiety disorders. The skills taught may help those with good insight and self-awareness.

Price: Free 

WorryWatch

For individuals with chronic worry, anticipatory anxiety, and GAD, this app provides simple self-monitoring and documenting of worry within a pre-fixed menu, as well as a graphical tool that charts the worry entries by various factors. It also prompts the user to think about whether the he or she believes the actual worry was as bad as what actually happened.
This app was created based on the personal experience of a longtime sufferer of GAD. It is not meant to replace traditional therapy such as CBT, but can be used to supplement it. It is not suited for those who have difficulty interpreting graphical representations of information. It would be helpful to have a tutorial to highlight the features of the app and how to use it. It does a terrific job of displaying evidence of the intensity, frequency, and duration of cognitive distortions.

Price: Under $4.99

Self Help for Anxiety Management 

SAM might be perfect for you if you’re interested in self-help, but meditation isn’t your thing. Users are prompted to build their own 24-hour anxiety toolkit that allows you to track anxious thoughts and behavior over time, and learn 25 different self-help techniques. You can also use SAM’s “Social Cloud” feature to confidentially connect with other users in an online community for additional support.

Price: Free

FearTools Anxiety Aid
​
Incorporates tracking and exposure therapy to slowly overcome fears

Price: Free 

Mindfulness

Calm
​
Calm by Apple as the 2017 iPhone App of the Year, Calm is quickly becoming regarded as one of the best mental health apps available. Calm provides people experiencing stress and anxiety with guided meditations, sleep stories, breathing programs, and relaxing music. This app is truly universal; whether you’ve never tried meditation before or regularly practice, you’ll find the perfect program for you.

Price: Some Free, Premium $70 per year 

​Headspace

Targeted to anyone who wants to learn meditation to reduce anxiety and stress and improve their attention and awareness; good for a beginner to establish a regular meditative routine. The skills taught include mindfulness and cognitive diffusion, breathing exercises, meditation practice, tips for increased relaxation, concentration; may be applied to anxiety and depressive disorders, PTSD, and OCD, especially in conjunction with a health provider.
This app does a terrific job of describing basic concepts with a creative animated interface, presenting meditation in a user-friendly way with clear instructions; creating an online forum; supplying podcasts; normalizing mind-wandering; and illustrating main points with videos.
This app is not intended as a treatment substitute for those with serious anxiety and related disorders or depression.

Price: Free for the first 10 sessions
​
Ten Percent Happier

Want to sleep better, find relaxation, be more mindful and, well, ten percent happier? This is the app for you. Ten Percent Happier has a library of 500+ guided meditations on topics ranging from anxiety and stress to parenting and sleep, as well as videos, bite-sized stories, and inspiration you can listen to on the go. New content is added weekly so you’ll never tire of having to do the same meditative practice again and again.

Price: $12.99 per month 

Insight Timer

Insight Timer is a large, app-based library of guided meditations. The free version includes 30,000 free meditations, including a group specifically made to aid your sleep.

Price: Free 

Stop Breath and Think 

Featuring more than 40 free activities of differing lengths, Stop, Breathe & Think isn’t a cookie-cutter meditation and mindfulness app. It stands out from a crowded pack of mental health apps by integrating customization tools into your experience. Whenever you open Stop, Breathe & Think, the app has you take a short survey, asking you to check-in on yourself before starting. Based on your current state of mind and mood, it’ll analyze your answers and then offer up custom meditations specially designed for your mental health needs in the moment.

Price: Free 

Simple Habit

As seen on the hit show Shark Tank, Simple Habit bills itself as the go-to meditation app for the busiest of us. With Simple Habit, no one is truly too busy to meditate. The app only asks for five minutes of your time each day, offering up specialized meditations for specific symptoms (depression, anxiety, stress) and life situations (waking-up, commuting, tough days at work). Its prized feature may be its On-The-Go mode, which simply asks “What are you doing?” and provides prompts like “sleep,” “morning,” “taking a break” or “SOS” before ushering you to the right meditation for that moment. That full-tilt customization and simple interface makes Simple Habit one of the best mental health apps available.

Price: Free 

Waking Up

Created by famed neuroscientist, author, philosopher and star podcaster Sam Harris, the Waking Up meditation app zigs where other meditation apps zag. Whereas many mental health apps merely help you find relief in the moment, Waking Up’s more holistic approach focuses on much longer-term gains and personal revelations, urging its users to make “fundamental discoveries in the laboratory of your own mind.”

Price: Free 

BellyBio Interactive Breathing

Wonderful biofeedback device that monitors your breathing and plays sounds reminiscent of ocean waves when you relax. Great for anxiety and stress.

Price: Free
​
iChill

Do you notice how anxiety or stress impacts you in both mind and body? Just as the name suggests, the iChill app is designed to help with whole-body stress management. The app is built to cut across several demographics: children, teens, adults, veterans, and more. iChill is also teaches users skills from the Trauma Resiliency Model.

Price: Free 

Abide

Each day users receive a fresh, new meditation from the Bible that renews the mind. Start or end the day in peace.

Price: Free 

Panic Attacks

Panic Relief

This app is targeted to help individuals with panic disorder access easy-to-use, empirically supported coping tools to better manage and move through panic attacks.
The free version includes access to progressive muscle relaxation of the arm skill, while the upgrade allows access to the rest of the skills, including square breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation.

Price: Free Version ​
​
Rootd

Rootd is a mental health app meant for people who suffer from debilitating panic attacks and anxiety. One use of Rootd is to turn to the app when panic or anxiety starts. The panic button feature helps users through their anxiety or panic using breathing tools and stress management exercises.

Price: Free 

Breathe+

This app is similar to Paced Breathing, but for iPhone users. With this app, you can practice deep inhales and exhales to calm yourself down when you’re anxious or panicked.

Price: Free

Sleep 

Digipill

Is one of the best mental health apps that help in getting better sleep. 

Price: Free

iSleep Easy

Offers guided meditations, playlists and courses to promote sleep.

Price: Free 

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

​Live OCD Free

Designed for CBT treatment of OCD with different sections for children and adults. It includes standard and user-designed exposures, ERP (exposure response prevention) exercises; a cognitive toolkit, and ERP reminder, and an ERP guide with custom and standard ERPs.
Another strength is the support of both direct and loop tape exposure (via microphone). The ERP module is almost entirely behavioral, without using possibly useful cognitive tools. Duration of ERP exercises is determined by time but not by decrease in anxiety levels.

Price: Free

GGOCD

GG OCD aims to improve OCD symptoms by increasing the user’s awareness of negative thoughts and training the brain to push those aside to embrace a more positive outset. The app takes the users through various levels, each consisting of short games around a specific theme. From how to automatically replace negative self-talk with positive thoughts, to belief in change, building self-esteem and more, this app takes its user on a journey towards a healthier thinking pattern.

Price: Free

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 

PE Coach

Designed for individuals with PTSD, specifically those working with a therapist using prolonged exposure (PE) treatment. The skills taught include education about the treatment, and common reactions to trauma, and breathing retraining.

Not useful as a self-help treatment for PTSD; to get the most out of it, individuals should be in therapy.

Price: Free

​PTSD Coach

One of two self-help apps from the National Center for PTSD, this app is targeted to help individuals suffering from PTSD, as well as those simply interested in learning more about this disorder. The skills taught may be applied to individuals with mild to moderate versions of PTSD and for whom self-guided assessment and treatment might be sufficient. It is not recommended for PTSD sufferers who require one-to-one treatment, high-frequency direct clinical interface, or for those who have difficulty make safe decisions.
It does a terrific job of education, assessing PTSD, and offering easy to understand tips to manage common PTSD symptoms, and finding additional treatment resources with providers via a search function.

​Price: Free

​CPT Coach

This is targeted at individuals with PTSD who are in active treatment with a trained CPT (cognitive processing therapy) therapist. Designed to be used by the patient in concert with CPT treatment, this app offers a great deal of education about PTSD symptoms and a step-by-step, session-by-session approach to following the assessments that correspond with each of week of CPT treatment. The variety of possible prompts and reminders, from scheduling appointments to reminders for homework, add an additional layer of important structure and predictability often required with treatments for PTSD.

Price: Free

Domestic Violence

My Plan App

Is part of a group of mental health apps that are designed to help women determine if a relationship is unsafe.

Addiction 

Twenty Four Hours a Day
​
Based on the best-selling book of the same name, Twenty-Four Hours a Day offers 366 meditations from the book, making it easier for people in recovery from addiction to focus on sobriety wherever they are.

Price: Free

Quit That!

This is a completely free app that helps users beat their habits or addictions. Whether you’re looking to stop drinking alcohol, quit smoking, or stop taking drugs, it’s the perfect recovery tool to track and monitor your progress. Track as many vices as you want and find out how many minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years it’s been since you quit.

Price: Free 

Simple DBT Skills Diary Card 

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a popular form of therapy in the treatment of mental health disorders. DBT is used to treat substance use (SUDs) and personality disorders. DBT focuses on practicing skills that help users control the intensity of their reactions in emotional situations. DBT is a method for teaching skills that help you maintain an emotional balance, and this app helps you stay on that track.

If you are recovering from substance abuse or need help managing your reactions to stressors, this would be one of the best mental health apps for you.

Price: Free

Sober Time

Sober Time helps you stay motivated and inspired. It’s a mental health app that tracks sobriety down to the second and updates in real-time. The clock ticks up the seconds, minutes, hours and days. There are more than 10 unique ways to display your progress with individual and community features.

Price: Free 

LetGOH

LetGOH is a mental health app that focuses on issues that fit well into the 12-step recovery model. The app provides inventory tools, sponsorship aids, and meditations to help users reduce or quit their addictions.
LetGOH is suitable for people with addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, food and co-dependency. LetGOH includes inventory lists for the 10th and 11th steps as well as daily tracking of progress and meditations.

Price: Free 

Grief

Grief Support Network App

This if one of the mental health apps that focuses on local connections by creating a free proximity-based social network connecting & supporting people grieving.

Price: Free

Eating Disorder 

Recovery Record ​

Recovery Record is a great app for anyone recovering from an eating disorder and wanting to develop a more positive body image. Keep a record of the meals you eat and how they make you feel using the app and complete questionnaires that’ll help you track your progress over time. One user calls Recovery Record a “remarkable recovery tool”; “It helps me stick to my meal plan, provides an outlet to vent about my food concerns and helps me stay intact with my body to work with it rather than against.”

​Price: Free 

Rise Up + Recover

Rise Up + Recover is a unique app as it not only allows you to track your meals and how you feel when you eat them, but you can also transcribe your progress into a PDF printout. Pull up the Rise + Recover app on your mobile when you feel the urge to binge or skip a meal, and need quick coping strategies.

Price: Free

Lifesum

Unlike the other apps featured in this list, Lifesum is a broader resource for all things healthy living. The app allows you to set personal goals, from eating healthier, to building more muscle and getting in more steps each day. You can also enter your own personal data and let Lifesum generate a “Life Score” to get a personalized roadmap to better health. With reminders to drink water and eat regularly throughout the day, Lifesum is a great option for anyone trying to live healthier, but for people with eating disorders, this app can be used to help you redefine how you think about healthy body

Price: Free 

Jourvie

Provides mood and meal tracking tools for users with eating disorders

Price: Free 

Suicide Prevention 

notok

This is a free app developed by a struggling teenager (and her teen brother) for teenagers. The app features a large, red button that can be activated to let close friends, family and their support network know help is needed. Users can add up to five trusted contacts as part of their support group so when they hit the digital panic button, a message along with their current GPS location is sent to their contacts. The message reads: “Hey, I’m not OK! Please call, text, or come find me.”

Price: Free 

distract

If you’re having suicidal thoughts or thoughts of self-harm, distrACT works to give you quick, accurate information about these thoughts and how to get through them. The app was created by doctors who have expertise in self-harm and suicide prevention.

Price: Free

MY3

A mental health app designed by the Mental Health Association of New York City, MY3 is for those managing suicidal thoughts and urges. Even in your darkest times, this app can help you get through them by connecting you to your support network—or your “3” as the app calls it. You set-up three emergency contacts—perhaps a relative, friend, and doctor—and they become instantly accessible with the tap of an on-screen button. From there, you can build-out a safety plan in the app, listing your own warning signs, coping strategies, helpful distractions and places of comfort.

Price: Free

Calm Harm

This is an app developed by a Clinical Psychologist that is geared towards helping prevent self-harm.
The password secured app has 4 major categories (Distract, Comfort, “Express Yourself” and Release) that are strategically placed to help you progressively get out of the self-harm mindset.

Price: Free 

Marriage 

Gottman Card Apps

This is an app-based version of cards used at The Gottman Institute, a research-backed institute focused on the study of marriage and family therapy. Husband and wife John and Julie Gottman, both clinical psychologists, head the institute. With this app, you’ll be privy to a deck of cards the Gottman’s created for couples in need of therapy. The cards help jog your memory to share your feelings with your partner, ask about their feelings, and plan intimate moments.

Price: Free

Love Nudge

Based on the book The Five Love Languages, it will help you put the concepts of the love languages into action in ways that are easy obvious and satisfying. 

​Price: Free 






​​"I say I'm fine, yeah I'm fine oh I'm fine, but I am not I'm broken"

- Matthew West