A growing market for mental health applications and increasing evidence for the efficacy of these applications have made apps a popular mode of mental healthcare delivery. However, given the gravity of mental illnesses, the potential harms of using these applications must be continually investigated. In this study, we conducted a thematic analysis using user-comments left on depression self-management applications. We analyzed 6,253 reviews from thirty-six, systematically selected apps from the Google Play and Apple App stores. We identified four themes regarding the potential, unintentional harms caused by these applications. This study uniquely contributes to the literature by examining the reported harms to users caused by depression self-management apps and contextualizing them in an ethical framework. We provide recommendations to developers for creating ethical depression self-management apps and resources for practitioners and consumers to aid in screening apps.

With the increasing usage of mental health applications (MHAs), there is growing concern regarding their data privacy practices. Analyzing 437 user reviews from 83 apps, we outline users’ predominant privacy and security concerns with currently available apps. We then compare those concerns to criteria from two prominent app evaluation websites – Privacy Not Included and One Mind PsyberGuide. Our findings show that MHA users have myriad data privacy and security concerns including a user’s control over their own data, but these concerns do not often overlap with those of experts from evaluation websites who focus more on issues such as required password strength. We highlight this disconnect and propose solutions in how the mental health care ecosystem can provide better guidance to MHA users and experts from the fields of privacy and security and mental health technology in choosing and evaluating, respectively, potentially useful mental health apps.