Naturalistic evaluation of a mental health and wellbeing app incorporating applied video games and gamification (MindMax): Wellbeing, resilience, and help-seeking outcomes

Introduction: While men display lower help-seeking rates than women, there is a lack of mental health interventions targeting men. To address this issue, we developed a smartphone app named MindMax, an Australian Football League (AFL)-themed app containing psychoeducational modules teaching strategies derived from positive psychology and acceptance and commitment therapy. MindMax also incorporates gamification, casual video games, and social connection and is intended to appeal to male Australians interested in AFL. This study reports results from a naturalistic trial intended to investigate whether using MindMax was associated with improved wellbeing, resilience, and help-seeking. Methods: We conducted a naturalistic trial from July 2017 to May 2018, collecting data from 279 participants (156/279, 55.9% female; 117/279, 41.9% male). As we employed a customised version of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ), we conducted an exploratory factor analysis and extracted two factors that we interpreted as ‘personal help-seeking’ and ‘impersonal help-seeking’. A mixed design MANOVA was conducted with flourishing, resilience, personal help-seeking, impersonal help-seeking, relatedness, and self-group overlap to MindMax. Results: We observed significant 30-day increases in impersonal help-seeking in males with low base wellbeing, and in self-group overlap with MindMax in all participants except males with low base wellbeing. We also observed significant increases in resilience in low-usage participants with low base wellbeing, and in flourishing in participants with low base wellbeing. Discussion/Conclusion: Our findings suggest that exposure to MindMax was broadly beneficial for trial participants, particularly our male participants with low base wellbeing. Future research can consider investigating more explicitly the role of conformity to masculine norms and how that may affect uptake of mHealth technologies and help-seeking behaviour.