How to Create a Mental Health App: From Idea to Step-by-step Roadmap

Nowadays, many people prioritize their careers and wealth, often paying little attention to their mental wellness. However, the awareness of the population increases, thus, more people start using mental health services.

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a new wave of demand for mental healthcare services — about 33% of people reported having negative impacts on their mental health and well-being in February 2023. The same factor has driven the mental healthcare systems toward digitization and mental health app development.

To boost engagement, consider incorporating mental health application features, such as gamification elements:

• Achievements & Rewards;
• In-app currency or points redeemable for goods;
• Coupons;
• Leaderboards;
• Tiers.

While gamification enhances user engagement (especially in corporate wellness app development), it’s not always suitable for apps focused on mental illnesses. Patients with conditions like anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies, or OCD may feel frustrated by missed rewards or leaderboard positions.

When you develop a mental health app, it's crucial to carefully design features to prevent negative thought patterns and avoid harm.

Workflow Automatization

One major benefit of app development for healthcare, especially for mental health, is automating processes, which reduces specialists' workload and cuts costs — allowing healthcare professionals to serve more patients with the same effort.

Here are key areas you can automate in your mental health app project:

• Patient registration;
• Appointment booking;
• Pre-appointment patient interviews;
• Payment processing;
• Electronic health records;
• Daily symptom tracking;
• Prescription reminders, allowing patients to check dosages or instructions easily in the app.

Security & Regulations Compliance

Data security is essential when making a mental health app — especially during women health tracking app development.

There are quite a few features that you can use to enable high-level security:

• Multi-factor authentication: password, token, biometrics (fingerprint, face ID), one-time codes, phone verification, and security questions.
• End-to-end encryption: ensures only the sender and recipient can read messages. Check out this video for details:

• Device fingerprinting: tracks device details; users get alerts if unusual activity is detected.
• Real-time fraud notifications.

Moreover, it's important to educate users on what they should or shouldn’t do to prevent data leaks. For a health insurance app company, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like HIPAA is crucial for handling sensitive medical data and personal information. Awareness may be as helpful as the high level of security itself.

Additionally, regulatory compliance is essential for mental health app development solutions. Depending on your location or user base, you may need to adhere to various privacy laws:

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): An EU law governing data privacy, applying to businesses working with EU citizens’ data — even outside the EU.
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act): A U.S. federal law with national standards for health data protection, vital for mental health apps handling medical information.
• PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act): Canada’s data privacy law, setting a framework for data security and privacy.

Collect mental health information, such as psychological disorders, chronic illnesses, allergies, and intolerances. In mental health app development, you may also need to include additional questions depending on your app's specific focus and features.

Offering an option to attach test results or reports (e.g., blood tests or therapy session notes) will enhance the profile and may require a file upload feature.

# 2: Well-Being Check-Ups 📑

If you want to develop an app to track mental health, include daily check-ups with general mood and health questions, following frameworks like ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy). Allow users to add personalized questions and address specific mental health concerns tailored to different disorders or symptoms.

Provide a space for additional notes with each question and a comment section at the end of the check-up. For practical use, let users store each check-up to monitor changes in their well-being over time.

# 3: Thought Diary 📘

A thought diary is vital for expressing emotions, especially for those facing mental health challenges and mood changes. Designing a mental health app, you should include a basic typing feature and offer options for drawing, using colors, shapes, and audio messages — helpful for those who struggle to put feelings into words.

Provide prompts to guide users and inspire reflection. If needed, allow users to share their mood journals with a doctor directly through the app or via another platform.

# 4: Chat & Video Sessions with Specialists 📷

Enhance your telemedicine therapy app by offering video appointments with licensed therapists, clinical psychologists, and mental health experts.

During mental health mobile application development, include essential features like:

• Screen recording for rewatching sessions.
• Chat for ongoing communication before and after sessions, with real-time access during calls.
• File sharing for documents like test results.
• Paintbrush tools for visual expression during sessions.

These features can improve the user experience and ensure effective support.

# 5: On-Demand Video/Audio Content 📷

Offer on-demand videos or audio content for mental health crises when a specialist isn’t needed but the patient still requires support. When learning how to create a mental health app consider including therapeutic recordings for anxiety or panic attacks, offering coping strategies.

Other useful content can include:

• Grounding techniques;
• Meditation exercises & stress relief;
• Symptom management or prevention;
• Daily positive affirmations for mood-setting.

These resources can help patients manage their mental health independently between sessions.

# 6: Urgent Mental Help 📛

During psychological therapy app development, you can add a set of emergency support features to assist patients during crises.

For example, these may include:

• Access to quick emergency messages or calls (such as 112 or 911).
• Calling someone from a pre-saved list of close contacts, like a spouse, parents, or friends.
• A live chat or call option to reach your service’s support line.

In addition to urgent care, it might be a good idea to provide general contact information for regular cases, such as your mental health service’s phone number, email, physical address (if applicable), social media links, etc.

# 7: Meditation & Other Mental Activities 🧘

In mental health app development, incorporate customizable in-app meditations to help patients manage their emotions and adopt a mindful lifestyle. Offer different durations (3, 5, or 10 minutes) and tag meditations (e.g., "For Anxiety," "For Stress") for easy access. You can use Artificial Intelligence to recommend meditation techniques based on user preferences.

Beyond meditations, add other activities like:

• Breathing exercises;
• Stretching & yoga;
• Mindfulness exercises (e.g., tree planting).

You can learn more about yoga application development in our comprehensive guide!

# 8: Forums & Group Chats 💬

Creating a sense of community is crucial for users struggling with mental problems. When you develop a mobile mental health solution, allow users to connect via forums and group chats, fostering a supportive environment.

To maintain safety, include a Bad Word Filter to prevent bullying and harmful language, using APIs like Microsoft Azure’s Content Safety or Perspective. If you want to meet customer expectations, you should provide anonymous emotional support to users, enabling them to seek support without disclosing their identity.

# 9: Push Notifications 📳

To enhance mental health app features, you can enable push notifications to remind patients about certain activities, such as journaling, symptom trackers, and taking medicines.

Additionally, sending motivational and encouraging messages can remind users how strong and capable they are.

Self-esteem and gratitude for the progress one is making are crucial for mental health. Push notifications can play a key role in helping your users realize this.

While the primary goal of such apps is to help people, we shouldn’t forget the mental health app business plan. You can also use push notifications to offer personalized offers, which can help boost sales.

# 10: Third-Party Integrations 🤖

If you want to measure certain physical activity, such as heart rate and daily activities (like steps or running), and incorporate this data into users’ medical profiles, you can allow them to connect their BLE devices with your app.

To build a mental health app, you’ll need an API like Apple's HealthKit. This API supports transferring data from fitness apps and health IoT devices.

At Stormotion, we’ve enabled data transactions from cadence and heart rate sensors directly into the Platoon Fit app, a fitness project that emphasizes health monitoring gadgets.

Additionally, there are various other tools and technologies you can use to build a physical therapy app or mental health app:

• Calendars: APIs like Google Calendar, Nylas, Zoho, etc.
• Push Notifications: Consider APIs like OneSignal or Pusher.
• Chats: You can use Sendbird, Stream, Vonage, and others.
• Video Sessions: APIs like Agora, Twilio, etc.

# 11 Dashboard for Specialists

There are two options for making a doctor-centric dashboard:

1. A separate app for practicing doctors.
2. A dual-version app where users select their role (doctor or patient) during sign-up.

Surely, the process to create a mental health app will be different for the two options, however, all features apply to either. Here’s a breakdown of features specialists might need.

1. Doctor Profile

Allow doctors and clinicians to manage their profile, including:

• Name, photo, and specialization;
• Contact details and available hours;
• Rating and reviews;
• Pricing details (e.g., hourly rates).

During mental health mobile application development, add filters for patients to easily search for doctors based on specialization, rating, or availability.

2. Patient Profile

Doctors need access to detailed patient databases, such as:

• Medical history;
• Current diagnosis;
• Prescriptions;
• Test results.

When you start a mental health app, organize patients into customizable lists, such as New, Current, and Closed (stopped medication/treatment). Consider allowing doctors to create lists to manage patients according to their needs.

3. Schedule

A built-in scheduling tool is essential, with features like:

• Calendar integration to manage appointments;
• Appointment notes;
• Integration with third-party platforms (e.g., CRM or video call tools like Google Meets, Zoom).

Creating a mental health app, enable automatic transfer of new user data to CRM platforms or sync with video conferencing tools for easy appointments.

4. Chat

The chat feature should allow for seamless communication, including:

• Real-time messages;
• File sharing (lab results, documents, photos);
• Direct photo/video upload via camera integration;
• Notes bar for doctors to mark important info.

When you build a mental health app, organize chats into categories — new, current, and inactive — to manage multiple patient conversations easily.

5. Analytics

Provide specialists with important performance metrics, such as:

• Daily/weekly/monthly patient counts;
• Total number of patients;
• New patient requests;
• Revenue tracking (total and per therapy session);
• Patient satisfaction rate.

Use these insights, backed by clinical evidence, to help doctors optimize their services and improve patient outcomes.

If you’re interested in integrating these essential mental health features, contact us to discuss how our development expertise can bring your vision to life.

Some useful features for this include:

• Self-assessments: Custom questionnaires or journaling prompts to capture daily thoughts and feelings.
• Video consultations: Short calls with specialists to discuss well-being face-to-face.
• Grounding tools: Meditations, mood monitoring, breathing exercises, and anger management techniques to help users manage their emotions.

2. Suicide Prevention

For individuals struggling with severe anxiety or depression, suicidal thoughts can sometimes arise.

Learning how to develop a mental health app can be crucial in designing a solution that provides immediate support:

• Distraction tools: Audio or video recordings designed to divert attention away from self-destructive thoughts.
• Emergency services: Quick access to emergency lines for mental health support or ambulances.
• Preventive mental health care guidelines: Education on how to recognize the warning signs of suicidal tendencies and how to address them.
• Suicide risk assessments: In-app questionnaires that assess risk factors, including past attempts, family history, substance abuse, and trauma.
• Educational resources: Evidence-based guides, webinars, and content to help both users and their loved ones understand how to respond to mental health crises.

Examples of Anxiety, Depression & Mood Control Apps

Here are a few apps currently leading the way in anxiety, depression, and mood control:

• Anxiety Release. Offers tools to cope with anxiety, along with educational content to raise awareness about mental health.
• Dare. Focuses on managing panic attacks and provides users with challenges for recovery.
• AbleTo. Combines self-care, peer support, coaching, and therapy to help users manage their mental health.
• TalkLife. A community-based app where users can share experiences and receive support from others facing similar challenges.

Addiction Recovery

By making a mental health app, you can create a powerful tool for addiction recovery, supporting both clinical treatment and self-management. Specialized features can enhance recovery for drug, alcohol, and behavioral addictions, helping users stay on track.

1. Progress Tracking & Encouraging

Visualizing progress has a positive impact on addiction recovery. These features can help users stay motivated:

• Progress bar: Track milestones like “one month alcohol-free.”
• Day counter: A daily counter on the main screen to track consecutive clean days.
• Daily reports: Encourage users to log their daily recovery progress.

Combining these features with motivational push notifications like “Keep it up, you’re doing great!” or gamification elements — avatars, tiers, and rewards for reaching milestones — grounded in positive psychology techniques, can boost user engagement and persistence.

2. Relapse Prevention Tools

Prevention is crucial for maintaining long-term recovery.

During mental health application development, you can add such features:

• Psychoeducation: Users learn more about the biological and psychological aspects of addiction and relapse triggers.
• Clinical uploads: Users can upload blood test results (e.g., alcohol or drug levels), enabling specialists to monitor and intervene if necessary.

Examples of Addiction Recovery Apps

Let’s take a look at some real-world examples of such apps:

• PursueCare RESET. FDA-approved app offering cognitive skills training to improve addiction outcomes.
• Sober Grid. A global sober community with 24/7 live coaching support.

Mental Disorders

WHO reports that 1 in 8 people worldwide suffer from mental disorders.

When you create a psychological therapy app, it can play a crucial role in managing psychological disorders like OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder, violent behavior, and schizophrenia. These apps assist with symptom mitigation, self-care, early detection of exacerbations, and overall mental health practices. Here are some features that can be highly effective:

1. Journaling

Journaling is a valuable tool in psychiatry for those managing mental disorders, as it allows users to track their mental well-being throughout the day. This is especially beneficial for conditions like OCD and PTSD, where shifts in mood and behaviors are key indicators.

By regularly documenting thoughts, feelings, and experiences, users can gain insights into their emotional patterns. This data can help specialists detect changes, identify triggers, and adapt psychotherapy and mental health treatment plans.

Additionally, when making a mental health app, mood questionnaires tailored to individual users can help track emotional health and provide valuable information for ongoing care.

Examples of Mental Disorders Apps

Since the range of mental disorders is quite wide, we’ve decided to give a couple of mental disorder apps for the most known illnesses:

• OCD: nOCD, Liberate: My OCD Fighter.
• PTSD: PTSD Coach, ACT Coach.
• Bipolar: eMoods Bipolar.

These apps primarily focus on mood tracking, offering valuable support with clinical validity in conjunction with professional medical treatment, and helping users manage their symptoms more effectively.

Eating Disorder

World Population Review states that about 70 million people worldwide struggle with eating disorders. Treating eating disorders, such as anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia involves both physical and mental health aspects, requiring a balanced approach to care.

In mental health application development, here are some key app features that can be included in eating disorder apps to support users.

1. Calorie Tracking & Recipes

Accurate tracking of calories helps users avoid overeating or undereating, supporting healthy eating habits. By integrating APIs like CalorieKing, users can easily log ingredients, dishes, or separate products, and the app will calculate calories and nutrients automatically.

Offering recipe lists tailored to various needs (e.g., diabetes, allergies, calorie counts) further supports personalized care.

Check out our article dedicated to Nutrition & Diet Apps:

2. Meal Planner

A customizable meal planner helps users manage their eating habits more effectively. Designing a mental helath app for eating disorder, you should include:

• Customizable meal options;
• Detailed dish descriptions;
• Recipe planning & notes;
• Daily reminders.

Allowing healthcare providers to access and adjust meal plans can also enhance support and ensure adherence to treatment goals.

Examples of Eating Disorder Apps

Here are some real-life examples of such apps:

• Recovery Record. Highly personalized with a focus on recovery.
• Rise Up. Includes educational content and emotional support tools.
• Brigher Bite. Scientifically grounded coping methods for effective recovery.
• Plan to Eat. Guides users through recovery with grocery lists and meal calendars integrated with other platforms.

Self-Development

The mental self-improvement app market is broad, addressing goals like building patience, boosting concentration, overcoming fears, and increasing self-confidence. In mental health app development, here’s how you can enhance your app to better serve users:

1. Coaching Sessions

Many users benefit from personalized clinically supported guidance, so integrating coaching sessions can significantly enhance their experience.

Consider offering:

• Live coaching with mentors or therapists.
• Pre-recorded courses with step-by-step video guides.
• Learning materials (articles, videos, etc.).
• Goal-setting features.

2. Habits Tracker

A habits tracker encourages systematic progress by helping users stay on track. After gathering information through questionnaires, set personal goals and let users create custom to-do lists.

Use color-coded calendars for visualizing progress, a key mental health application features to help users track their journey:

• 0-25% of the goal — red.
• 26-50% — orange.
• 51-75% — yellow.
• 76-100% — green.

3. Workouts

Many users aim for physical improvements as part of their self-development journey. Creating a mental health app, you can include:

• Workouts targeting specific muscle groups.
• Tailored routines based on health issues (e.g., back or knee pain).
• Workouts of varying intensity and duration.

Examples of Self-Development Apps

There are quite a lot of such apps on the market:

• Remente.
• Happify.
• Coach.me.

Meditation & Mindfulness

As more people become aware of their “inner self,” an increasing number are turning to meditation apps to reduce stress levels and emotional burden, stay grounded, better understand their feelings, and simply enjoy a few moments of silence.

We won’t go into detail here, but if you're looking for expert help, our meditation app development company can bring your vision to life.

Examples of Meditation & Mindfulness Apps

Let’s look at a few existing solutions as evidence of success:

• Calm. This app offers a wide variety of content, including meditations, breathing exercises, sleep stories, music, and even remixes of famous artists and songs designed to improve sleep, focus, and more.
• Headspace. Headspace places a strong emphasis on educating users, utilizing video content and celebrity involvement to guide them.
• Insight Timer. Known for its extensive free content, Insight Timer offers over 90,000 meditation sessions at no cost.
• Buddhify. What sets Buddhify apart is its adaptation to modern, busy lifestyles, offering meditations that can be done on the go or while multitasking.

Check out our case study on the first three apps for valuable tips on enhancing your meditation and mindfulness products.

Keep in mind that these are just some of the most typical cases. If your use case isn’t on the list or doesn’t quite fit into any category, feel free to reach out — we’re here to help!

Our mental health app development company created an app with a fresh concept, improving upon their previous solutions. We revamped the content distribution system for Feel Amazing — users no longer receive courses via email with a Dropbox link. Now, all courses are easily accessible and purchasable directly within the app.

If you'd like to learn more about this specific project, follow the link to the case study on our website:

Tips for Hiring the Right Mental Health Software Development Firm:

1. Look for Mental Health App Experience: Choose developers with experience in the mental health or wellness industry.
2. Review Portfolio: Check their previous work and case studies to assess their skills and style.
3. Evaluate Technical Skills: Ensure they are proficient in necessary technologies and integrations (e.g., React Native, HealthKit).
4. Focus on User-Centric Design: Ensure they prioritize intuitive, accessible design.
5. Check Data Security Knowledge: Confirm they follow best practices for privacy and compliance (HIPAA, GDPR).
6. Check References: Read client reviews or ask for references to gauge reliability and quality.

List of Features and Rapid Prototyping

Collaborate with your fitness and workout app development team to identify the essential mental health tracking features your app will offer. From there, start developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test the app’s core design and functionality without extensive coding.

This approach helps you validate your ideas quickly, saving both time and money. Involve experienced mental health app developers early on to assess the technical feasibility of the project and ensure you're addressing any unique requirements.

For initial testing, consider using a no-code solution with pre-built interface elements to quickly prototype and gather user feedback before investing in full-scale development.

Application Development Process

Once your MVP is complete and meets all requirements, transition into full-scale depression app development. During this phase, prioritize writing secure, user-friendly code. Focus on the following:

1. Compliance with HIPAA: Ensure the app adheres to HIPAA regulations for patient data protection.
2. Telemedicine Integration: Implement third-party SDKs for secure medical audio or video consultations to enable telemedicine features.
3. Use of Pre-built Libraries: Leverage ready-to-use libraries for essential functions like bio authentication, scheduling, and in-app chat to save time and ensure functionality.

Testing

Before launching your app, conduct thorough app testing to ensure optimal functionality and performance across various devices in the context of mental health app development. Key testing types include:

1. Module Testing: Test individual components to ensure they function correctly.
2. Performance Testing: Evaluate the app's stability and scalability under normal usage.
3. Functional Testing: Verify that the app meets all specified requirements and works as intended.
4. Stress Testing: Assess the app’s performance under extreme conditions, such as heavy traffic or high load.

Marketing Strategy

Promote your app by leveraging a variety of marketing channels. Use social media advertising, advertising banners, and consider placing advertisements in locations where your target audience frequently visits.

Focus on boosting brand awareness and educating potential users about the app’s advantages and advanced features. Tailor your messaging to highlight how your app addresses specific customer needs and improves their well-being.

Application Launch

Once testing and marketing are complete, launch your app on the appropriate platforms, including iOS and Android.

Updates and Maintenance

After the release, continuously monitor app performance, user engagement, and feedback. Mental health app developers should regularly update the app to enhance its functionality, fix bugs, and add new features. This ensures user retention and helps attract new customers by keeping the app relevant and improving the overall user experience.

💡 Takeaways

Creating a mental health app requires careful planning to create an engaging, secure, and supportive experience. Key takeaways include:

• User Engagement: Features like gamification, personalized check-ins, and meditation exercises help retain users, but should be sensitively designed to avoid negative thinking patterns.
• Workflow Automation: Automating tasks such as registration, appointment scheduling, and symptom tracking eases the workload for healthcare providers, expanding access to mental health support.
• Data Security and Compliance: Adherence to data protection laws (GDPR, HIPAA, PIPEDA) is essential to protect sensitive user data.
• Core Features: Essential tools include user profiles, daily check-ups, thought diaries, real-time chat, video sessions, and on-demand content.
• Emergency Support: Emergency contact options and 24/7 support enhance user safety and access during crises.
• Tools for Specialists: Features like specialist dashboards and analytics enable healthcare providers to monitor patient progress and streamline mental health treatment.

This guide provides a roadmap for developing a mental health app that balances user engagement, security measures, efficient care delivery, and integration with medicine.

If you need assistance with mental health app development or have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help you on your journey to improving users’ mental well-being!