Member-only story
Mental health tech is broken. We’re betting on games to fix it.
A therapist and a science writer look at the issues with wellness apps and argue for a radical new approach.
In 2017, two psychologists from Duke University published the results of a decades-long study that stands to change the way we think about mental health and what we do to protect our own wellbeing. After following more than 1,000 people from the time they were 11 until they turned 38, the researchers found something unexpected in the data: a whopping 82.7% of subjects met the clinical criteria for a mental health problem at least once during the course of the study, meaning that only 17.3% never developed clinical symptoms.
Other studies have shown that positive mental health is not the same thing as the absence of mental illness. In between those two poles, there’s a spectrum of wellbeing — from flourishing to languishing — and most of us, it turns out, fall more towards the languishing side.
Yet we tend to put little effort into our mental wellbeing until it’s at breaking point. That’s like waiting until you’re clinically obese before deciding to go to the gym.
