**4. Discussion**

This study compares the use of mental health apps before and during the pandemic amongst different age and gender groups. There are compelling reasons to directly focus on this area of study since, with remote lifestyle becoming the norm, digital tools are being used increasingly to provide guided and unguided mental health care remotely [34]. The findings from this paper are objective, as the data were used to accurately quantify the mental health app usage of users from 10 different countries, as compared to the use of self-reported data in the literature. Additionally, these findings can also be applied to a social isolation setting since limiting the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in prolonged periods of social isolation. Being socially isolated for even less than 10 days can cause long-term mental health problems [35]. Table 6 summarizes the findings related to RQ1, and Table 7 summarizes the findings related to RQ2 and RQ3.

**Table 6.** Summary of results of the analysis performed to answer RQ1.


\* *Significance level* < 0.05.



#### **Table 7.** *Cont.*


\* *Significance level* < 0.05.
