Introducing Digital Mental Health Tools: A Modular, Transdiagnostically-Oriented Digital Ecosystem for Developing, Testing, and Implementing Scalable, Personalized Psychological Interventions

Despite growing awareness of and efforts to combat mental illness in recent decades, its global burden continues to rise, and although evidence-based treatments exist, most individuals with mental health symptoms do not receive adequate treatment. Evidence-based digital psychotherapies are highly customizable, can be delivered at low or no cost, and are ideal for addressing issues of access and for developing new and more effective interventions. University of Arizona’s Digital Mental Health Tools (DMHTools; called STAND Digital Therapy at the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA] where it was originally developed), aims to deliver scalable, effective tools for common mental disorders. DMHTools was developed to address obstacles to accessing high-quality, personalized psychotherapy and to improve our understanding of how and for whom psychological treatments work. Here, we provide a narrative description of the philosophy behind DMHTools and describe its essential components. We then describe its development and note key challenges alongside our decision-making process to highlight looming issues for personalized digital mental health. Finally, we describe preliminary results from ongoing research utilizing DMHTools, and identify future directions for developing, implementing, and disseminating personalized digital therapies at scale.