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Accepted Paper:
'It's not therapy but it feels like therapy': on mental health apps and therapeutic relations
Mikkel Kenni Bruun
(King's College London)
Digital health technologies have offered new ways of imagining and enacting 'wellness' in and beyond clinical contexts. Drawing on fieldwork in Britain, this paper argues that mental health apps encourage modes of being well that decentre and reconfigure 'the therapeutic relationship'.
Paper long abstract:
Digital psychotherapeutics features increasingly as a central rather than peripheral aspect of British mental healthcare. The proliferation of smartphone apps promoting mental health and wellbeing has been shaped in particular by the novel coronavirus outbreak and subsequent calls for digital solutions to a reported mental health crisis. In a (post-)pandemic world, mental health apps have offered new ways of imagining and enacting 'wellness' in and beyond clinical contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Britain on the uses of digital health technologies, this paper argues that mental health apps encourage users to practise modes of being well that radically decentre 'the therapeutic relationship' found in (non-digital) psychotherapy. We will see that 'mental health' emerges as simultaneously an object and tool of observation and inspection that constitute new therapeutic relations for everyone involved.