[App Fridays] This Google-recommended app provides mental health support to users

2020 has been a stressful year for many of us. While the pandemic put the spotlight on mental health and how it is as important as our physical health, it also gave rise to a number of mental health apps. Google has also come up with its list of apps that have the potential to make 2021 better for you.

Singapore-based Intellect, picked by Google as one of the best personal growth apps of 2020, helps you restructure your personal, social, and work-life by tackling the root of your psychology through its scientific process. Developed by a team of psychologists and behavioural experts, the app offers a new form of psychological training with quick bite-sized sessions to help you work towards who you want to be.

The app makers say Intellect will let people embark on an entirely new way to work on their traits, habits, and behaviours. The app claims to help users overcome personal struggles like procrastination, low self-esteem, and anxiety, and also help them become more assertive, sociable, and confident. 

Launched in early 2020, the app has more than one million downloads so far on the Google Play Store and has got 4.8-star rating out of 5. The users seem to love it already, and say that this app is by far the best self-help app.

We decided to explore Intellect for this week’s app review section and here are our first impressions.

Let us get started

To get started, you have to create an account with your email or you can also signup with your Facebook or Google account. Next, the app asks for some additional information such as your gender, age, current biggest struggles, top priorities, etc.

The app then analyses these inputs to create a personalised experience for each user. Before getting started with that, Intellect app also flashes a note on the screen saying, “we use zero-knowledge encryption, so no one other than you can access any of your data”.

What we already like about the app is that it uses simple language, which makes it very user-friendly.

How does Intellect help?

Before getting you started on your habits and behaviours, the app gives you a quick session on how it is going to work and what is in store for you and gives you a ‘training plan’. After using the app for the first few times, we gathered that the app keeps working on your training plan and keeps asking you questions from time to time. 

It has a Big Five test to assess your behaviour, and five other key traits, which depicts how you generally are and how you might tend to behave in different situations.

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Even if you do not use the app, we recommend you to take this test as we felt it provides quite accurate results. For instance, we scored 44 out of 80 for Conscientiousness, which is much higher than the average of 27 as per the app. The app not just helps you know your traits, but also explains it in detail and quantifies it for you where you stand on that trait.

This is not it. The app digs even deeper and helps you to understand how your traits influence different aspects of your daily life in just 100 words. All these results are stored on your profile page of the app, and you can revisit them any time you want.

Onboarding and learning paths

All the tests and analysis are to create a customised training plan for you, or as the Intellect app calls it - Learning paths.

The app unfurls various paths for you, depending on your needs. Since we entered answers around stress, anxiety, and productivity, our training sessions were around procrastination, emotion regulation, conflict management, cooperation, etc.

We opened conflict management, and the app offered us a bite-sized course on it, broken into five small sessions. The sessions are a mix of audio, video, and animation.

We are definitely going to use the app for self-improvement. It could take a while for users to understand how the app works, but it is a cake-walk later to navigate within the app.

As of now, the app is free to use and we did not come across any paid features at the time of reviewing the app. But according to media reports, Intellect usually charges a monthly fee that gives unlimited access to all its features, but the app has been made free during the COVID-19 pandemic to help users deal with stressful times.

The verdict

If you are looking for effective self-improvement, we recommend you to use this app. However, it needs serious commitment from the user. More sessions and training unlock as you use the app, and the app keeps customising your experience throughout the journey. 

It is a serious app with an amazing and smooth user interface. We really loved its bite-sized sessions and how the app personalises the whole experience for its users. We just hope that when it resumes the paid-version, the app will offer some useful features for free as well. Go for it, Intellect is your new personal companion to creating a better you.