Mental health applications and their use by university students

Abstract

This research focuses on the use of mobile apps to promote mental health by university students. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the difficulties that university students have in accessing these apps, the positive and negative aspects they perceive about the apps and the reasons that lead students to uninstall the app or not to continue using it. As a result, the paper analyses the difficulties leading to finding a mental health support app, perceived advantages, disadvantages and reasons for uninstalling apps from the perspective of university students. A functional outcome of this research may be a mapping of selected apps, especially those backed by Czech developers, describing how they work, the area of difficulties they address, as well as information on whether the apps are supported by evidence-based research. Another practically applicable outcome of the work is also recommendations that could be implicated in practice to help improve the services of these applications. These are suggested both by the users of the apps themselves, but also by the author of the thesis based on data analysis.