Me Apps: Mental Health and the Smartphone

Abstract

This chapter considers how mental health care is done in and by digital culture in the UK. The author examines how treatments for anxiety and depression operate in today’s technosocial age of smartphone hegemony. Smartphones, the author argues, offer valuable insight into contemporary health and wellbeing precisely because they are emblematic of the neoliberal production logics, knowledge claims and modes of address that structure this moment in digital culture history. The author also shows how this moment is the outcome of key shifts in computing hardware, software, and content. Empirically, this research focusses on mapping Britain’s terrain of smartphone interventions for anxiety and depression. Working from a dataset of 635 apps, the author develops a four-part framework for understanding products and services in this crowded marketplace relative to an app’s (1) intended audience; (2) communicative affordances; (3) business model; and (4) therapeutic approach. Through this framework, the author proposes the notion of me apps to codify the individualised, commercialised, and desocialised mode of address enacted by most of the apps in the dataset. The author shows that the ideology of me apps, and the modes of address they employ, frame mental illness as an individual problem and regard treatment as an individual endeavour. The end of the chapter considers the possibility of an alternative vision for designing technologies of mental wellbeing.

Citation

Feldman, Z. (2021), "Me Apps: Mental Health and the Smartphone", Ajana, B., Braga, J. and Guidi, S. (Ed.) The Quantification of Bodies in Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 157-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-883-820211013