Selling Glossy, Easy Futures: A Feminist Exploration of Commercial Mental-Health-focused Self-Care Apps’ Descriptions in the Google Play Store

Spors, Velvet; Gesine Wagner, Hanne; Flintham, Martin; Brundell, Pat; Murphy, David

Abstract

Self-care apps ofer a wide variety of diferent therapy paradigms, pedagogies and concepts for people to maintain and make sense of their mental health. However, as human-made artefacts, these apps are being imbued with their designers' interests, opinions, biases and assumptions about self-care. This paper is interested in making these (often) implicit notions visible. After selecting 69 apps from the Google Play Store, we use Feminist Content Analysis to investigate the store descriptions of these apps: Inductively through thematic analysis and deductively through charting concepts found within the descriptions. Our fndings indicate that commercial self-care apps portray themselves as future creating tools for individual self-discovery, but they also create narratives that propagate an overly simplistic, individualistic and potentially harmful view of mental distress. We conclude this paper by sketching out alternative design considerations for how self-care apps can portray themselves and communicate in a more transparent, plurality-embracing fashion.

Citation

Spors, V., Gesine Wagner, H., Flintham, M., Brundell, P., & Murphy, D. (2021, May). Selling Glossy, Easy Futures: A Feminist Exploration of Commercial Mental-Health-focused Self-Care Apps’ Descriptions in the Google Play Store. Presented at CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama Japan

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Start Date: May 8, 2021
• End Date: May 13, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Dec 13, 2020
• Online Publication Date: May 7, 2021
• Publication Date: May 7, 2021
• Deposit Date: Mar 25, 2025
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450380966
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445500
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/34634197
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445500