How to Create a Mental Health App and Put Psychological Therapist Into Pocket

With mobile users bringing the most traffic & dominating the market, many businesses choose to build a mental health app, including those focused on yoga application development, for their healthcare services. Thus, providers can:

• Maintain a constant connection with their patients to understand their mental state a lot better.
• Reduce the workload on therapists and psychiatrists.
• Reach a wider audience.

So, if you want to create your own mental health app, modify your current solution, or simply learn more about mental health app development — welcome!

✅ Top Things Worth Attention When Developing a Mental Health App

In this section, we are going to give you some tips on how to “prepare the ground” for development and unlock the full potential of mental health applications.

Encouraging & Engaging

Mental health apps can really help specialists have more regular updates on their patients’ general well-being, the severity of symptoms, etc. They can help one to build a wider picture of patients’ mental states. Yet, it requires patients to actually use the app regularly, which can be quite a challenge sometimes.

Surely, patients understand that it’s for their own good, but this “motivation” isn’t always enough. So, to encourage people to use your app more often, you can add gamification features.

⚙️ Common Features for Mental Health Apps

In this section on common features for mental health apps, we will explore how to build a mental health app by reviewing key features.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

Normally, we recommend making the sign-up process as fast as possible, so as not to repel new users. However, for mental health apps, it’s something rather necessary, since user policies for such apps are more strict. At the very beginning, it will most likely be enough for you to ask for full name, phone number, and/or email.

Additionally, there’s a bunch of other tools and technologies that you can use for your mental health app:

• These APIs can be used to implement a calendar: Google Calendar, Nylas, Zoho, etc.
• To enable push-notification, consider using such APIs as OneSignal or Pusher.
• Chats can be enabled with Sendbird, Stream, Vonage, and others.
• For video sessions with specialists, you can use Agora, Twilio, etc.

👨‍⚕️ Types of Mental Healthcare App

The mental health industry is quite diverse. There is a wide range of apps that target different people with various issues and disorders.

In this section, we’ll cover the most widespread types of mental health apps, which are for:

• Anxiety, Depression & Mood Control
• Mental Disorders
• Addiction Recovery
• Eating Disorders
• Self-Development
• Meditation & Mindfulness

If you see the type that suits your use case the most, feel free to click on the link to start reading that exact piece.

Keep in mind that these are only the most typical cases. If your use case isn’t on the list or you can’t really categorize it, feel free to drop us a line — we’ll help you!

Anxiety, Depression & Mood Control

Anxiety, depression, and mood swings are some of the most common mental health issues of an individual who lives in a capitalistic society — approximately 301 million people, or about 4% of the world's population, suffer from an anxiety disorder. And in 2023, 32.3% of US adults reported symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Let’s take a look at how you can use an app to help patients cope with such mental issues.

# 1: Assessment Tests

Confronting crowded spaces and public speaking often act as anxiety triggers for individuals with social anxiety. Even though these conditions need to be clinically diagnosed, it’s possible to determine whether or not an individual has symptoms of such with help of assessment tests.

To sum up, we’d like to point out that even though some features might be more suitable for certain types of apps, each case is unique, thus, any combination of features is possible.

🌟 Our Expertise: Feel Amazing

We at Stormotion developed an app for Ailsa’s Frank project Feel Amazing. She’s a British motivational keynote speaker and hypnotherapist.

This project is intended to help people become a better version of themselves by providing courses on various topics like fighting fears, building confidence, taking control over addictions, improving communication skills, and so on.

Since the app covers some sensitive topics like addictions (alcohol, binge drinking (separate courses for men and women), smoking, taking cocaine, etc.), we’ve enabled the Child Lock feature.

📊 Dashboard for Specialists

There are two ways of how you can develop a dashboard for specialists:

• You create a separate solution for doctors.
• You build two versions of an app and when signing up, a user can choose if they’re a doctor or a patient.

Surely, the therapist app development process will be different for the two options, however, all features are applicable to either.

In this section, we’ll cover what features you might need to add to your app for specialists.

# 1: Doctor Profile

To make it easier for users to choose specialists and for doctors to work with patients that meet their competencies, you can add doctor profiles.

🤓 Mental Health App Development Steps

In this section, we will give you 8 basic steps on how to create a mental health app.

Formulating a Unique Concept

Start a mental health app by creating a unique idea for your app. Define your target audience, customer age group, compile and analyze a list of competitors. Answer the key question: "How will my product differ from existing ones?". Sketch out your brand's business strategy with all its details.

Building a Qualified Development Team

To create a mental health app, you'll need to hire a team of experienced mental health app developers, project managers, UI/UX designers, and quality control specialists. If you don't have such experts on your team, consider outsourcing to a company that offers all mental health app development services.

List of Features and Rapid Prototyping

Work with the development team to identify potential basic functions of your application and start developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This process allows you to test the app design and functionality without extensive coding, saving time and money. Involve mental health app developers to assess the technical feasibility of the project. As an alternative for initial app testing, consider using a no-code approach with standard interface elements.

💰 What Affects Mental Health App Development Costs

Even a more or less accurate calculation of the costs is quite a challenge since first of all, each case is unique, and second of all, you never know what unexpected costs can pop up during the process.

However, it can be helpful to take certain aspects of the development that directly influence the costs and app development time into account, which are:

1. Number & complexity of features.
2. The technology of development.
3. 3rd-party integrations (if you want or need any).
4. The hourly rate of your development team.

We tried to roughly estimate what the costs might look like when you're wondering how to make a mental health app: