App review: How can the Mindspa app help you improve your mental health?

One in four Nigerians suffer from mental illness, but help is hampered by tight budgets and a lack of skilled staff.

According to an article on Aljazeera

Despite obvious ignorance of mental health issues due to religion and/or culture, there are organisations and apps like Mindspa, who create awareness and help solve the problem.

For this week’s app review, we will be reviewing Mindspa: a mental health app.

About the app

Mindspa mental health app, released 2020, is designed to provide emotional support in everyday challenges.

Mindspa is a THERAPIST IN YOUR POCKET 24/7 kind of app, and is a step toward mental health improvement. While it does not replace the professional help of a mental health doctor, Mindspa can be a powerful complement to therapy, and in the case of inaccessibility or affordability.

Criteria for review:  User interface, products offered, effectiveness, pricing, and user feedback.

User interface

The MindSpa app comes with cool, neutral colours – white and light blue – that provide some sort of relaxed mood.

Choosing the right fonts for your app can mean the difference between a compelling, attractive design and a boring, lifeless one. Mindspa considers this and uses clear but stylish fonts.

Navigation through the features of the app is seamless as the titles of the buttons provide clarity.

The signing up process is straightforward and usually takes less than two minutes. 

Products offered

Psychosutra self-help work out

This feature helps you with issues like fear, shame, social anxiety, loneliness, sadness, apathy, melancholy, anger, guilt and many more.

As a self-coaching mental health app, this feature provides neatly arranged long-term tasks that help you deal with whatever issues you may select and decide to work on. These tasks help you improve your mental health and general well-being in whatever area you need help in. 

Mental well-being articles

This feature gives you access to articles on a wide range of topics on mental health and self-actualisation.

Personal diary and stats

This feature can be used as a journal to write down your feelings or your moods.

The diary is a psychotherapeutic tool that helps analyse what you have written down with statistics, pointing out the areas you need to work more on to improve your mental health and general wellbeing. 

It is a useful tool for gauging your mood. And those with thoughts and tendencies to self-harm are asked specific questions to help understand where their mind is at and their chances of harming themselves.

Digital therapeutic courses

The Mindspa app has a collection of therapeutic courses that have been put together by professional psychologists to help improve your mental health. 

The courses are cognitive behavioural therapy and gestalt therapy programs which are often used by psychologists for psycho-social intervention as a treatment for signs of various symptoms of mental health issues mostly for patients with symptoms of anxiety disorders and depression. 

Emergency chatbot

The chatbot is always available to listen to you and give you viable responses to questions asked.

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Products effectiveness

If you want to better understand your emotions and how your mind works, you will find some free tools on this app that will help.

90% of users of this app reported an improvement in their mental health since using the app.

The app features practical content on dealing with relationship issues, family challenges, a difficult colleague, how to set boundaries or even how to get your money back from a lender.

Pricing 

While a good percentage of the content on the app is accessible free of charge, the courses are not free, but affordable.

The courses available on the app can be purchased for as low as ₦400 and as high as ₦36,000.

What users are saying? 

Marina: Amazing tool if you want to help yourself live your best life. So much free content. Plus, all of the paid courses are more than affordable. Thank you for everything you do. I love your work.

Jennifer Lude: Psychosutra was beneficial!. There is a part with pain and it helps you cope. It is one of the best things I’ve seen. Especially if you looking for alternative methods for pain reduction.

Dacia: Great app. Cool articles on very pertinent subjects, then you can journal about said subjects and feelings!

Conclusion/Suggestions

A) The diary section can include a link to a resource to help people understand the situation better.

If it can be deduced that a person has a high chance of self-harming through the diary entry, then they shouldn’t just be left just like that, the logical next step would be to suggest something that would ensure they do not carry out that thought. 

Or, an alert system to a family or friend when such is determined.

B) It would be helpful to include a mental health dictionary that contains the A-Z of mental health issues like ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, etc, with a definition of the terms, symptoms, recommendations on how to treat it, etc. 

From Technext to you, the Mindspa mental health app is a great tool for treating mental health-related issues, and the fact that 80% of the resources on the app is absolutely free is quite helpful.