Two kinds of mirror?: recrafting mediated selves in apps for mental wellbeing

Digital health has been proposed as a possible solution for what many see as a crisis in mental health and wellbeing, combining growing prevalences with decreases in accessibility and continuity of care (WHO, 2022). Digital apps are seen to have enormous potential to help alleviate unmet mental healthcare needs, particularly in terms of access, inclusion, efficiency (value for money), personalisation, responsiveness and avoidance of stigma. Easy to use, discreet, convenient, portable, and often cheap, the market for ‘mental wellbeing apps’ has gone beyond the strict expert definition of mental health consolidating in the last decade around $1.4 billion of global revenues in 2023, with a five-fold expected growth in ten years (Grand View Research, 2023; also Statistica, 2025). It is estimated that there are now more than 20,000 mental wellbeing apps available (Agarwal S, Jalan M, Wilcox HC et al., 2022), ranging from those designed to manage specific conditions to general meditation and mindfulness apps, mood trackers and increasingly conversational chatbots and AI for companionship and support.