How to find a good app for mental health

Search for 'stress', 'depression', 'anxiety', or 'mental health' in the app store on your mobile device and you are confronted with a bewildering array of options. Some apps claim to track your mood over time, while others claim to 'cure' your mental ill health with hypnosis. Apps hold amazing potential as mental health and wellbeing tools. You can carry them everywhere, engage with them in real time as you're experiencing distress, and interact with them in a completely different way to other self-help tools. But it is important to know which apps you can rely on for good support, and which might even do you harm. There is no current accreditation system for apps designed to improve or support mental health. And while some respectable organisations have lists of recommended apps, such as ReachOut.com and eMHPrac, very few of these apps are supported by experimental evidence. This means there is no way of knowing whether they actually help or not.