by Karen Young (BSc)(Psych)(Hons)MastGestTher

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New Collection of Apps Can Reduce Depression and Anxiety by 50%

New Collection of Apps for Depression and Anxiety Can Reduce Symptoms by 50%

Technology is often criticised for its bulging intrusion into our lives, but researchers from Northwestern University have developed a collection of 13 clinical apps for depression and anxiety. Collectively, the apps are known as IntelliCare, and research has found that they can reduce anxiety and depression by up to 50%.

Anxiety and depression can hit hard, and too often. More than 20% of people have significant symptoms of anxiety or depression, but only 20% get the treatment they need to manage their symptoms. The good news is that research is finding powerful ways for people to self-support and improve their symptoms without medication or outside intervention.

For some people, medication makes an important difference, but any management of anxiety or depression has to include lifestyle factors that have been proven to strengthen the brain and support mental strong health. Two of the most profoundly important lifestyle factors are mindfulness and exercise. They have enormous potential to reduce the symptoms of depression and anxiety by changing the structure and function of the brain. When done together, they can reduce the symptoms of depression by up to 40% in two months. And then, there are apps …

‘Using digital tools for mental health is emerging as an important part of our future.’ David Mohr, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

So about these apps – what makes them special?

Clinicians at Northwestern University have developed a ‘suite’ of 13 apps, each based on techniques used by therapists. Each app strengthens a particular skill, and the idea is that users choose one or two apps to focus on each week to really strengthen the skills.

The apps are called IntelliCare, and research has found that they can significantly reduce anxiety and depression to levels that would be comparable to intervention with psychotherapy or antidepressants. 

The apps are based on different theories of psychology, and have been designed to be used frequently and briefly, in line with the way most people use a mobile phone (checking emails, texting, looking for a restaurant, making a call). 

One of the main challenges facing the developers of the app was to design something that people would stay with and use consistently. Many apps that are created to boost mental health work on one single strategy to improve symptoms, or they have too many features that make the app difficult to use. We humans tend to be fans of novelty and simplicity, so apps that become boring or that are complicated to navigate around can tend to lose people after a few weeks. The designers of IntelliCare took this on board. With thirteen apps in the IntelliCare suite, people have the opportunity to rotate the particular apps they are using to keep a sense of novelty and to reduce the potential for boredom and dropout. 

“We designed these apps so they fit easily into people’s lives and could be used as simply as apps to find a restaurant or directions.” David Mohr, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologie, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Let’s talk about the research.

The study is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. 96 people participated in the study (age 27-50). All had elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety. 82 had depression, 82 had anxiety, and 63 had both anxiety and depression.

95% of the participants downloaded five or more of the IntelliCare apps. By the end of the study, participants reported about a 50% decrease in their depression and anxiety symptoms. 

By the end of the treatment, of the people who had depression:

  • 37% met the criteria for full remission or no symptoms for depression,
  • 40% had only mild symptoms, and
  • 22% continued to need treatment.

And the ones who had anxiety, by the end of treatment:

  • 42% met the criteria for full remission or no symptoms,
  • 45% had only mild symptoms, and
  • 14% continued to need treatment.

Meet the IntelliCare apps for depression and anxiety …

The apps are available for free from the Google Play Store (find them here). Here’s a rundown on each individual app:

  • Intellicare Hub: The control tower that helps you to manage and personalise the IntelliCare apps. 
  • Aspire: Helps to identify the values that are important to you and the actions that can help you live according to those values. Helps to track those actions during the day to add purpose and increase satisfaction.
  • Boost Me: Encourages you to schedule activities that lift you when your mood drops. Keeps track of activities that make you feel good.
  • Day to Day: Tips, tricks and info to improve mood. Learn how to nurture gratitude, activate pleasure, increase connectedness – and plenty of other things that make life lovely.
  • Daily Feats: designed for motivation and to increase life satisfaction by adding rewarding activities into your day. (Also available for iPhone.)
  • Social Force: Helps to firm up your tribe.
  • My Mantra: Helps you to find the words that will lift you and motivate you. Create mantras that motivate you and highlight strengths and values.
  • Thought Challenger: Helps with the thoughts that dig in and cause trouble – the head hogs that exaggerate the negative, bring you down, and persuade you to be too tough on yourself. (Also available for iPhone.)
  • iCope: Lets you send yourself messages in your own words to help get you through the tough stuff.
  • Purple Chill: Audio recordings to help you unwind, de-stress and worry less. Teaches relaxation and mindfulness exercises.
  • MoveMe: Helps with exercises to boost your mood. Access to exercise videos and lessons to help you stay motivated exercise. Just like a coach in your pocket.
  • Slumber Time: For peaceful zzz’s – sleep diaries, bedtime checklist to make sure your mind is primed for sleep, audio recordings to get you relaxed. Oh, and an alarm clock.
  • Worry Knot: Helps you to ease up on worrying with lessons, daily tips, distractions and a worry management tool to deal with specific problems that won’t budge. Helps awith ‘tangled thinking’ and keeps you on track with progress stats. (Also available for iPhone.)

The IntelliCare algorithm suggests new apps each week to keep things fresh and avoid the experience becoming stale.

We now have evidence these approaches will likely work. They are designed to teach many of the same skills therapists teach patients. Different apps are expected to work for different people. The goal is to find what’s right for you. David Mohr

And finally.

Depression and anxiety have a way of stealing people’s personal power and putting helplessness and disempowerment in their place. The truth is that people with depression and anxiety are strong and resourceful – they have to be to live their lives and function day to day with symptoms that swipe the way depression and anxiety do. Now technology is finding ways to help people use that strength and resourcefulness and find a way through. 

UPDATE:  The developers of Intellicare have advised that three apps are now available on iOS for iPhone users. These are Thought Challenger, Worry Knot, and Daily Feats. They are hoping to continue to releasing their apps on iOS, and I will post updates as I receive them.

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Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need.

Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything.

When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them.

They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate.

Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first.

The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 19

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 17976303911870995
Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need. Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything. When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them. They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate. Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first. The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion.

When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options.

When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come.

Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings.

They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully.

When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness).

Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies.

Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling.

This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them.

It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy.

In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them.

Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 10

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 18081959395923958
Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion. When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options. When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come. Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings. They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully. When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness). Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies. Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling. This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them. It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy. In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them. Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today.

So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls ,
@michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger.

And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you.

Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves.

Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground.

But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving.

And that’s okay.

There’s no rush. You have time. We have time.

In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 2

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 18351463621084496
Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today. So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls , @michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger. And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you. Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves. Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground. But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving. And that’s okay. There’s no rush. You have time. We have time. In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all.

The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem.

Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words.

First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy.

At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious.

Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is.

Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us.

Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view.

But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms.

If the words are disrespectful, try:

‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’

Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk.

Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Jul 21

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 17913738897080523
Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all. The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem. Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words. First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy. At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious. Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is. Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us. Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view. But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms. If the words are disrespectful, try: ‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’ Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk. Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Perth and Adeladie - can`t wait to see you!

The Resilient Kids Conference is coming to:

- Perth on Saturday 19 July
- Adelaide on Saturday 2 August

I love this conference. I love it so much. I love the people I`m speaking with. I love the people who come to listen. I love that there is a whole day dedicated to parents, carers, and the adults who are there in big and small ways for young people.

I’ll be joining the brilliant @michellemitchell.author, Steve Biddulph, and @matt.runnalls for a full day dedicated to supporting YOU with practical tools, powerful strategies, and life-changing insights on how we can show up even more for the kids and teens in our lives.

Michelle Mitchell will leave you energised and inspired as she shares how one caring adult can change the entire trajectory of a young life.

Steve Biddulph will offer powerful, perspective-shifting wisdom on how we can support young people (and ourselves) through anxiety.

Matt Runnalls will move and inspire you as he blends research, science, and his own lived experience to help us better support and strengthen our neurodivergent young people.

And then there`s me. I’ll be talking about how we can support kids and teens (and ourselves) through big feelings, how to set and hold loving boundaries, what to do when behaviour gets big, and how to build connection and influence that really lasts, even through the tricky times.

We’ll be with you the whole day — cheering you on, sharing what works, and holding space for the important work you do.

Whether you live with kids, work with kids, or show up in any way, big and small, for a young person — this day is for you.

Parents, carers, teachers, early educators, grandparents, aunts, uncles… you’re all part of a child’s village. This event is here for you, and so are we.❤️

See here for @resilientkidsconference tickets for more info https://michellemitchell.org/resilient-kids-conference

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Jul 12

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 17944784214008950
Perth and Adeladie - can't wait to see you! The Resilient Kids Conference is coming to: - Perth on Saturday 19 July - Adelaide on Saturday 2 August I love this conference. I love it so much. I love the people I'm speaking with. I love the people who come to listen. I love that there is a whole day dedicated to parents, carers, and the adults who are there in big and small ways for young people. I’ll be joining the brilliant @michellemitchell.author, Steve Biddulph, and @matt.runnalls for a full day dedicated to supporting YOU with practical tools, powerful strategies, and life-changing insights on how we can show up even more for the kids and teens in our lives. Michelle Mitchell will leave you energised and inspired as she shares how one caring adult can change the entire trajectory of a young life. Steve Biddulph will offer powerful, perspective-shifting wisdom on how we can support young people (and ourselves) through anxiety. Matt Runnalls will move and inspire you as he blends research, science, and his own lived experience to help us better support and strengthen our neurodivergent young people. And then there's me. I’ll be talking about how we can support kids and teens (and ourselves) through big feelings, how to set and hold loving boundaries, what to do when behaviour gets big, and how to build connection and influence that really lasts, even through the tricky times. We’ll be with you the whole day — cheering you on, sharing what works, and holding space for the important work you do. Whether you live with kids, work with kids, or show up in any way, big and small, for a young person — this day is for you. Parents, carers, teachers, early educators, grandparents, aunts, uncles… you’re all part of a child’s village. This event is here for you, and so are we.❤️ See here for @resilientkidsconference tickets for more info https://michellemitchell.org/resilient-kids-conference

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