How technology can help shape the future of mental health treatment
Technology is embedded in almost every aspect of our lives, including how we look after our mental health. People are increasingly turning to digital tools for support, from mental health apps to AI-powered chatbots, however, in healthcare settings, digital tools remain relatively uncommon. They have the potential to expand access to support, personalise treatment and help shape the future of mental healthcare.
10-minute read
10-minute read
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Getty Images
Technology is now embedded in almost every aspect of our lives, including how we look after our mental health. Around the world, people are increasingly turning to digital tools for support, from mental health apps to AI-powered chatbots. Emerging evidence suggests many people are already using large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to discuss their mental health concerns.
Yet digital mental health technologies remain relatively uncommon in healthcare settings compared with established treatments such as talking therapies and medicines. When people hear the term, they may think of wellness apps offering meditation exercises or online mood tracking. In reality, digital mental health interventions are part of a diverse and rapidly evolving field that includes tools designed to prevent, diagnose, monitor and treat mental health conditions. They have the potential to expand access to support, personalise treatment and help shape the future of mental healthcare. Better mental health care means having more useful options. Digital approaches can sit alongside medicines, therapy and other forms of support, giving people and services greater choice in how care is delivered.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
More than one billion people worldwide live with a mental health condition, yet access to effective support remains a major global challenge: the global median number of mental health workers is just 13 per 100,000 people. In England, at the end of June 2026, more than 2.37m people had an open referral with mental health services, and patient experience has declined in recent years.
The scale of unmet need can seem overwhelming. But technology offers an opportunity to find new ways to provide effective mental health support to people who are not well-served by existing services.
At Wellcome, we want to move beyond recognising the scale of the problem to championing using technology for the things it excels at: more personalised, flexible, scalable and easily accessible care. We are interested in how technology can help people access effective care in ways that work for them.
We want to address two key challenges. First, how can we develop effective interventions that can reach far more people than traditional models of care alone? Second, how can we generate the practical evidence that health systems need to confidently adopt and integrate new innovations into routine care?
What are digital interventions and how can they help?
Digital mental health technologies, often called digital interventions, can support the prevention, assessment, treatment and ongoing management of mental health conditions. Incorporating digital interventions into mental health care gives people more choice over how, when and where they access support.
For some people, digital support may be easier to access than traditional services. It can help overcome barriers related to distance, cost, stigma and mobility, while offering more flexible and personalised ways to engage with care. Someone might complete a course of therapy from home, use an app between appointments to practise techniques they learned in therapy or track how they are feeling throughout the week to share with their clinician, and help guide treatment decisions.
Digital mental health technologies take many forms, including:
- internet and app-delivered therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
- structured therapeutic programmes delivered online or via mobile app
- wearables: devices that monitor physiological and behavioural signals that may be relevant to mental health
- internet and app-based interventions to support mental health that can be used independently or alongside support from a healthcare professional
- AI-enabled tools such as chatbots trained to have conversations about mental health and deliver dialogue-based interventions
- teletherapy platforms: virtual video or text-based sessions connecting people with trained clinicians
The important question is whether these options help people get effective support when they need it. Digital interventions will not replace mental health professionals entirely or solve every challenge facing mental health services. However, they could become an important part of the future mental health toolkit, helping more people access effective support while offering new ways to personalise care and expanding the options people have for treatment.
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Qi Yang / Getty Images
What is needed to realise the full potential of digital mental health technology?
Realising the full potential of digital mental health technologies will require more than supporting the development of innovative new treatments. While research and innovation in this field are advancing rapidly, many promising interventions never reach the people who could benefit from them. To translate innovation into real-world impact, governments, health services, researchers, funders and companies must work together to design solutions that meet people's needs, build robust evidence that they are effective and safe and create pathways for implementation at scale.
Three factors will be particularly important:
1. Embedding lived experience
Like any mental health intervention, digital tools are best and most effective when they are developed with the people they are intended to support. Involving people with lived experience throughout design, development, evaluation and implementation can help ensure interventions meet real needs effectively and are accessible, engaging and culturally relevant. It can also help address barriers related to stigma, language, disability and differing levels of digital confidence, increasing the likelihood that innovations will be adopted and used in practice.
For example, SloMo is a blended therapy for people living with psychosis that combines traditional in-person sessions with a mobile app that supports people between therapy sessions. It was created by lived experience experts, clinical researchers, clinical psychologists, designers and software developers. Its innovative design, based on bubbles, was created by lived experience experts and helps slow down thinking to support better wellbeing and reduce paranoia.
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“I just want it to help other people as much as it has me.” – Lived experience experts and researchers talk about developing the SloMo app.
Amy Grant
Experiencing paranoia is like a beehive. Busy, noisy, unwanted thoughts racing around. Some paranoid thoughts are common and most people will experience them at some point. Like, "everyone is watching me". But sometimes they can become overwhelming. Constantly buzzing around in your head. At times the worries can feel silly, childish or embarrassing, but in the moment the evidence is too compelling to ignore. This was my experience. I'm Amy, resident zine maker and lived experience researcher. I'm part of a team who are trying to help people overcome these types of worries with a new therapy called SloMo.
Amy Hardy
I've always been very passionate about working in mental health. I think the mind is fascinating and particularly in terms of psychosis. People with psychosis were more likely to have experienced trauma and are more likely to drop out of therapy. The challenge was how do we create a therapy that is more appealing and easier to use that would improve access, experience and outcomes.
Chris
My contribution to this project stems from me suffering with paranoia, anxiety and feeling overwhelmed. Whether it's on the bus or in the queue in the supermarket, or just in a local park.
Amy Hardy
Paranoia is one of the most common difficulties in psychosis. Our ability to go on our gut instincts to make snap decisions. And that's really important because we need to be able to do that to function in life. But if we rely on that too much, it can cause problems. What we set out to do was to try and develop a digitally supported therapy, synchronised with a mobile app for paranoia in psychosis. To support people to learn to slow down their thinking.
Chris
The challenge was for all of us to agree that the app is going to be designed in a way that's going to be suitable for everyone.
Amy Hardy
Wellcome have supported this work. And what they allowed us to do was to put together an interdisciplinary team.
Anna Wojdecka
The key challenge of the project was finding the right analogy that will allow us to visualise thoughts. People who experienced such an emotional distress were finding it very difficult to think with abstract concepts, such as thoughts, while they were experiencing distress.
Chris
We didn't want it to look too dull, but we didn't want it to look too flashy either. If the app was a bit too tricky or flashy to use, that could heighten the anxiety.
Anna Wojdecka
To our surprise, it turned out that the analogy of thoughts as bubbles really resonated with people.
Amy Grant
Just like how speech bubbles let you see what a comic character might be thinking. SloMo uses bubbles to help you write out and see your own thoughts. It gives you a new perspective. You start to ask yourself different questions like, "why did I think that?"
Chris
The bubble's perfect and it can spin as well. If your thoughts are really running, you can slow down the bubble.
Amy Grant
When I did SloMo therapy, writing in the bubbles helped me to slow down and process the situations I'm in. Because I was thinking more consciously.
Amy Hardy
We found that SloMo reduced paranoia, but importantly, we also found that it improved people's confidence, wellbeing, and quality of life. Encouragingly, we found that SloMo was equally effective regardless of people's backgrounds.
Anna Wojdecka
They felt heard. They started going out of the home, something that was really out of reach for them before. Yeah, it was very powerful to hear that.
Amy Grant
The number one thing SloMo has done for me is build confidence. From that, other areas in my life have improved, such as my relationships, socialising, and pursuing other goals. I hope SloMo will reach the people who usually slip through the net and give them the confidence to achieve what they want in life.
Amy Hardy
Digital health has significant potential to revolutionise mental health care. So we're really encouraged and we're very keen to move into scaling up SloMo across other NHS trusts in the UK.
Chris
I'm definitely proud, 100%. I personally do see the difference it can and will make.
2. Collaborating across sectors
Companies play an important role in helping promising interventions reach people. They bring expertise in user experience design, marketing, sustainable business planning and scaling digital services, helping to bridge the gap between research and real-world impact. Partnerships between researchers, people with lived experience, health services and companies can help bridge the gap between promising research and care, ensuring evidence-based interventions are sustainable and supporting their delivery at scale.
For example, Wellcome’s funding call brought research and lived experience expertise together with companies and not-for-profits to fund treatments of anxiety, depression and psychosis that had a clear route to scale-up.
3. Considering underserved groups
People should be able to trust that digital care is safe, effective and designed around their needs. That means considering who may be unintentionally excluded, protecting people's data and making sure people can access human support when they need it.
For example, Wysa, a chatbot-based mobile app that uses principles from cognitive behavioural therapy, is already being used in some UK services. Wellcome is funding research with Wysa to adapt it for adolescent girls in rural India, a group with extremely limited access to mental health treatments, focusing on designing for shared devices, unstable or low bandwidth internet connections and cultural barriers to care. The team will then evaluate its effectiveness, helping generate the evidence needed to understand where and for whom such tools can be most beneficial.
What is Wellcome doing?
Wellcome is championing the development of safe and inclusive digital mental health technologies that can expand access to support, improve treatment and strengthen mental health systems, as well as supporting the generation of evidence of how well they work and who they work best for. We believe these innovations could play an important role in shaping the future of mental health care.
We have brought together multidisciplinary partners to help promising digital tools and treatments reach more people with mental health problems.
Led by Prof Cathy Creswell, the University of Oxford is adapting and evaluating Online Support and Intervention in collaboration with Koa Health. Online Support and Intervention is a therapist-guided, parent-led platform for treating anxiety in children aged 5 to 12, already in use in the UK, and will be tested across diverse settings including the Philippines, Chile and Thailand.
Led by Chaitali Sinha, Wysa Ltd is adapting and evaluating its AI-enabled chatbot-based mental health app to improve access to effective support for adolescent girls experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression in rural India.
Led by Prof Dixon Chibanda, the University of Zimbabwe in collaboration with Inuka is testing a chat-based platform that enables lay health workers to deliver problem-solving and behavioural support to people experiencing depression in Zimbabwe.
Led by Dr Matteo Cella, King’s College London with HelloSelf is developing and testing an AI-enabled chatbot to support the delivery of CIRCuiTS, a digital version of cognitive remediation for young people experiencing psychosis and depression.
Led by Prof Mario Alvarez-Jimenez, the University of Melbourne with Orygen is developing and evaluating MOST-Nexus, an AI-enabled digital mental health platform that provides personalised, adaptive support for young people across multiple continents.
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