C-STRESS: A Mental Health App for College Students With Depression

More than half of U.S. college students experience significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress, and three-fourths of these college students do not obtain professional help due to overburdened mental health services at universities and colleges. Prevalence of mental disorders and inadequate utilization of mental health services is a particularly severe problem for minority students and community college students. Cognitively Based Compassion Training (CBCT) has been administered to a variety of populations, including college students (undergraduate students, medical school students) and younger adolescents in prior completed studies, that collectively showed that CBCT can significantly strengthen cognitive resilience to stress and substantially reduce depressive symptoms, stress-associated systemic inflammation, improve emotional regulation (including impulse control) and mindfulness; increase compassion, and improve empathetic accuracy (measured by fMRI) - a critical skill that aims at cultivating relationships and connection to others. Currently, as a face-to-face program, CBCT certification at Emory takes 1 year to complete, and there are only 48 CBCT instructors. Due to the course duration, location, and time-intensive requirement for certification, CBCT has limited reach and scalability in its current instructional model despite growing demands.

The research team developed C-STRESS, a digital treatment intervention that leverages CBCT to improve the mental health of college students. C-STRESS adapts the traditional intervention modality (face-to-face) of CBCT in the form of micro-learning and provides personalization options including virtual companions and an animated visual cue of growing a garden to promote student engagement. Using co-design sessions with college students, the research team developed other features in C-STRESS to address the target population's needs when it comes to using a mobile app for mental health care, including an audiovisual library of guided meditation and resources, journaling, virtual drop-ins with CBCT instructors, mood and wellbeing tracking, and crisis helpline.

The research team recruited an independent convenience sample of 3 UCI undergraduate and graduate students to pilot test the initial content (introduction and modules 0-3) of the prototype C-STRESS mobile application. Participants completed measures via REDCap. Once enrolled, participants met with a member of the research team via Zoom to a) download the prototype app, b) complete app orientation (eg. indicate reason(s) for using the app, indicate color scheme \& frequency of notification preferences, select avatar if desired, etc.), c) begin to explore the app and its functionality with a research team member available to provide technical assistance, and d) complete the System Usability Scale and Technology Acceptance Model questionnaires via REDCap survey link. After the app orientation, participants were asked to use the prototype C-STRESS application at least once per day for 6 weeks. Daily usage ranged from approximately 2 minutes (opening the app and performing a one-minute meditation) to as much time as the participant desires (opening the app, completing available content, and unlimited meditation/reflection/journaling, etc. multiple times per day). At the end of week 3 (timepoint 1) and week 6 (timepoint 2), the participants were asked to complete measures via REDCap survey to assess C-STRESS's usability/feasibility and changes in depressive symptoms and coping styles over the 6-week study period.