Australian Digital Mental Health Services for Anxiety and Depression: Meta-Analysis and Comparison Study

Mental Health Online, MindSpot, and THIS WAY UP are 3 Australian Government-funded digital mental health services (DMHSs). These services are free for consumers and deliver a range of (depression and anxiety disorder) psychological assessments and interventions using the internet, with or without clinician support.

This study examines the uptake and effectiveness of these services.

We used 3 data sources to examine the performance of the three DMHSs: (1) aggregated routinely collected service data to describe uptake of the services from January 2013 to December 2021, (2) peer-reviewed and gray literature reporting treatment outcomes, and (3) treatment outcome data from one evaluation conducted by Mental Health Online. The second and third data sources were used to analyze the effectiveness of the DMHSs compared to other mental health treatment programs (Australian primary, public, and low-intensity mental health care; UK stepped psychological care). We generated pooled mental health symptom (Cohen d) effect sizes for each service's clinician-supported and self-directed treatments and compared those with effect sizes we calculated for the alternative treatment programs.