Jodie Vanderslot | Health Editor
Featured image: York’s self-help and wellness app is your new aid. | Basma Elbahnasawy
Stress, anxiety, and depression are common for university students, yet there are no mechanisms for students on-the-go to monitor their mental health status.
Mental health issues are on the rise, and so are the costs and wait lists associated with accessing mental health care. However, over the past year campuses across North America have been implementing WellTrack, a self-help app designed for students.
Last week, York introduced the app, launching it to students just in time for exams, when stress and anxiety are heightened.
WellTrack is designed to help students cope and monitor their stress and anxiety levels, as well as depression status, before they require further intervention and services. The app is a primary form of prevention, meant to keep you on track and in pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and self-care habits. WellTrack features different videos, relaxation and writing exercises, and mood tracking tools designed to raise awareness of your mental health state.
York’s Student Success Centre began slowly introducing the app to students, with the expectation that it will support and improve student life.
“York’s Health Education and Promotion office, which is part of the Student Success Centre, has done a slow launch of the tool over the last few months, averaging around 400 active users, and the data shows almost 60 per cent have gotten better after using the modules,” says Janice Walls, advisor and deputy spokesperson for York Media.
The app delivers interactive therapy to students, faculty, and staff through a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Individuals can create and employ their own modified version of care, addressing the issues they want to tackle.
“It’s definitely better than the other ones out, which are similar. It’s a nice app layout and design, and the zen room thing is nice!” says Mustafa Murtaza, a fourth-year Biotechnology student.
In order to create a customized course of therapy, each user will be asked to take a survey. Twice a day, they will be prompted to interact with the app and assess their mood.
WellTrack will ask you to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing when you experience certain thoughts or feelings—either positive or negative. It monitors unhelpful and devastating thought patterns.
“The tool was created out of a need for counselling (in all aspects of life, not just on campus). This provides an alternative to face-to-face counselling for those individuals who can benefit from an online tool. WellTrack courses are similar to what an individual would receive if they were receiving Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with a counsellor or clinical psychologist,” says Walls.
CBT is a practical form of psychotherapy, in which individuals are able to develop skills and strategies for becoming and staying mentally healthy, whilst combating day-to-day struggles. CBT is problem-focused and goal-oriented, functioning by addressing the relationship between thoughts (cognitions) and behaviours, and how they influence each other.
Behaviour can be redirected through techniques such as self-monitoring, activity scheduling, and exposure regulation. This involves recognizing what feelings and emotions one may experience during certain situations.
“It will enable them to access some services, on their own time and in their own way,” says Walls.
WellTrack is a part of York’s mental health strategy, designed to keep students’ mental health status in check while implementing primary prevention techniques such as: guided therapy, self-management competencies, a meditation zone, a thought diary, and activity schedule for stress, phobias, anxiety, and depression. It provides therapy with a counsellor, teaches relaxation techniques, and includes a virtual zen room.
“The mental health strategy emphasizes the need for us to focus on our institutional structure, mental health awareness, self-management competencies and coping skills, a supportive campus environment, as well as access to mental health services. Focusing on these areas will ultimately improve the mental health of our entire campus,” adds Walls.
WellTrack is a strategy for prevention and means of coping with the daily stresses and hardships individuals may be experiencing on their own.
With limited access to resources and long wait times, the app is intended to reach students in a way that may not otherwise be possible.
