Mental Health Consumption: Tracing the Past and Preparing for the Future in a Digital Age

Journal: Journal of Consumer Behaviour

With mental health issues affecting one in four people worldwide, the need for accessible mental health services has never been more critical. Depression and anxiety collectively impact hundreds of millions of individuals globally. Yet the mental healthcare system faces severe constraints. Traditional barriers including limited resources, shortage of qualified healthcare workers and pervasive societal stigma have long prevented people from accessing needed care. Those experiencing mental health difficulties often describe feeling ‘dehumanized’ and fear judgment when seeking help.

Digital platforms and mental health apps have emerged as potential solutions to these longstanding access problems. Platforms like BetterHelp, Calm and Headspace now serve millions of users, and most mental health providers have incorporated teletherapy into their services. This digital shift presents real opportunities to overcome traditional access barriers, but also introduces new complexities in how people consume mental health services, importantly new challenges to adopting digital medium for mental health consumption.

The key challenge involves understanding how consumers navigate online mental health platforms and what factors influence their adoption as well as engagement. The research addresses this challenge through a multi-method approach that integrates analysis of published academic articles with computational examination of user reviews from five major mental health applications. The researchers used advanced topic modeling techniques (BERTopic) to analyze actual user experiences.

The study draws upon the conceptual framework of ‘logic of choice’ and ‘logic of care’. The findings reveal three interesting aspects. First, the findings show that digital platforms overcome traditional barriers of mental health consumption, such as stigma, access and feeling of mental health issues as being ‘feminine’ in nature. Men particularly benefit from online forums where they can discuss struggles without concerns about appearing ‘less masculine’. Thus, the digital platform offers the ‘choice’ for mental health consumption. However, secondly, the study shows that online mental health consumption encounters newer issues around the ‘logic of care’. These barriers include privacy concerns, trust issues spanning both technology and healthcare providers, technical challenges like connectivity problems, and persistent cultural factors affecting adoption across populations. Thirdly, the study also reveals the importance of a dynamic interplay between user autonomy and professional care standards, where successful platforms must balance flexible, personalized options with quality assurance and therapeutic effectiveness.

The research contributes important implications across stakeholders. For platform developers, the findings highlight critical design considerations including privacy protections that do not compromise engagement and interfaces respecting cultural differences in help-seeking behaviors. For mental health professionals, digital tools offer opportunities to reach previously underserved populations while requiring awareness of technology-related barriers. For policymakers, the analysis highlights the need for regulatory frameworks protecting users while enabling innovation, particularly around data privacy standards and quality assurance for evidence-based content.