UC Irvine

Increasing rates of mental health diagnoses in college students signal the need for new opportunities to support the mental health of this population. With many mental health apps being efficacious, they may be a promising resource for college campuses to provide to their students. However, it is important to understand barriers to app adoption, hesitation, and desired features, which may inform decision making on which apps to provide as resources and how campuses can better support their use. This study aimed to understand interest and hesitation in app use, further exploring why college students may choose to use an app or not, as well as the relationship between depression, anxiety, positive mental health and app use. Using the web-based Healthy Minds Study, data were collected across colleges and universities and analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. Results from this study reveal that anxiety was the only significant predictor for app adoption (b = -.07, p < .001). Both depression (b =.03, p =.12) and positive mental health (b = -.02 , p = .17) were not significant in predicting app adoption. Findings from this study also underscore that simply providing digital mental health apps as tools may be insufficient in supporting their use in college campuses. Though many students were open to using a mental health app, hesitation and uncertainty were common in participant responses. Working with colleges and universities to increase digital literacy and provide resources that allow students to gauge when app use is appropriate may be helpful when implementing mental health apps as resources in college campuses.