Securing individual well-being is one of the most pressing goals of modern societies today. Yet, despite growing awareness of the harms of mental health disorders, symptoms of psychopathology are on the rise (e.g., Terlizzi & Zablotsky, 2024). According to the World Health Organization (2025, p. vii), over “1 billion people worldwide live with a mental disorder,” an alarming reality for the affected individuals, communities, and societies. When asked about the past twelve months, 46% of surveyed Europeans admit to having suffered from “an emotional or psychosocial problem”, an issue of growing concern to the European Commission (2023). In response, governments across the globe have been actively combating mental health challenges and mobilizing support for those in need. For example, the British government established the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (2017), which, in its report, focused on reducing the toll of social alienation in the United Kingdom. In Germany, the “Mental Health for Young People” strategy, part of the coalition agreement of the current German government, sets the ambitious goal of developing a holistic strategy for protecting the mental health of younger populations (Koalitionsvertrag, 2025, p. 101). Still, globally, the support offered to those in need appears insufficient (WHO 2025), and new approaches, interventions, and solutions are needed.

In this context, the growing rates of digitalization raise hopes that digital solutions can be used to combat mental illness and promote well-being by improving social connectedness, enhancing access to relevant information, enabling digitally mediated mental health tools for users, and facilitating access to therapy (e.g., Ellison et al., 2007; Wilhelm et al., 2020). Over time, however, the growing reliance on digital tools is increasingly seen as a double-edged sword, with both benefits and (unintended) risks for users’ mental health. For example, whereas some studies stress the potential of social networking sites to help users reap the emotional benefits of digitally mediated social connections (e.g., Ellison et al., 2007; Koroleva et al., 2011), other studies indicate that social media is a threat to users’ body image (e.g., Robinson et al., 2017; Brown & Tiggemann, 2016) and self-esteem (e.g., Krause et al., 2021), a factor in the proliferation of depression and anxiety (Liu et al., 2019), and a potential trigger for eating disorders (e.g., Dane & Bhatia, 2023).

The findings regarding the penetration of digital technologies in the work context has also been mixed. While increasing efficiency, the use of digital solutions blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, contributes to role ambiguity, and fuels work overload and job insecurity, resulting in undesirable technostress (e.g., Ayyagari et al., 2011). For example, videoconferencing helps workers overcome geographical boundaries and enables them to reap the benefits of remote work (e.g., Beck & Hensher, 2022), but the growing reliance on these tools has been associated with fatigue (Nesher Shoshan & Wehrt, 2022), and exposure to one’s image during calls has been shown to trigger undesirable appearance-related comparisons (Stimson, 2024) and dysmorphic concerns (Pikoos et al., 2021). Moreover, there are concerns regarding the contribution of digitally enabled remote work to workers’ loneliness (He et al., 2025; Knight et al., 2022).

In the context of education, studies examining students’ use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) highlight perceived benefits, such as improved confidence (Sousa & Cardoso, 2025) and self-efficacy (Kim et al., 2025). At the same time, they also report students’ concerns about the accuracy of information provided by GenAI tools (Veras et al., 2024), the potential loss of human connections, individual autonomy (Sousa & Cardoso, 2025), the lack of human and cultural awareness (Kim et al., 2025), and anxiety-inducing perceptions of job insecurity (Naher et al., 2023).

Overall, although digital solutions can provide useful assistance to users, they also involve possible undesirable consequences that must be addressed for the technology to realize its full potential in the lives of users, communities, and societies. In light of these challenges, this special issue aims to encourage and create a foundation for further research on the impact of digital solutions on users’ well-being and mental health. Specifically, we were looking for interdisciplinary contributions that can invigorate research discourse in this area while providing insights into how digital platforms and tools can shape users’ and societal well-being. To this end, this special issue includes five research papers that propose diverse interdisciplinary ideas and relevant implications for scholars, platform providers, and policy-makers.

The paper “Dark Patterns and Addictive Designs” by Xin Ye focuses on the harmful trend of addictive design prevalent on digital platforms. Considered a category of dark pattern, addictive designs involve user manipulation and can interfere with users’ autonomy, exerting harmful effects on users’ well-being and also their physical health. Despite the detrimental effects of these features, current regulations leave room for improvement. In this context, the paper proposes key directions for policy. Answering the call for more perspectives on the dark sides of technology use, the author alerts the public and policy-makers about ongoing challenges, advocating for improved regulation and, thereby, healthier and more sustainable platform design and use.

“Reddit as a ‘Safe Space’: Topic Modeling of Online Mental Health Communities for Depression and Anxiety,” authored by Maria F. Grub, examines the main themes influencing user interactions in Reddit communities focused on depression, anxiety, and overall mental health. Using natural language processing on a dataset of 12,631 posts from these communities, the study highlights how individuals turn to these online spaces to seek support, share knowledge, and discuss personal experiences related to their mental health. In addition to identifying the topics discussed in each community within the four categories of everyday life, dealing with the disease, diagnosis, and therapy, the analysis emphasizes the partially positive tone of interactions and members’ perceptions of these communities as “safe spaces.” Amid ongoing scientific and societal debates that often focus on the risks associated with social media use, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective, demonstrating that digital platforms can act as valuable support systems that complement the help available offline.

Next, the paper “Measuring the Experience of Eudaimonic Virtues in Technology Interaction” by Julian Marvin Jörs and Ernesto William De Luca introduces and validates the Eudaimonic Interaction Inventory (EII), a new scale for assessing the experience of eudaimonic virtues in interaction with technology. The scale measures the four core aspects of eudaimonic virtues: authenticity, meaning, excellence, and growth. Based on a literature review, the authors created an item pool and refined it through expert evaluation, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. This process resulted in a 12-item instrument. By proposing a scale for measuring eudaimonic technology interactions, the paper aligns with the special issue’s goal of understanding well-being in the digital world. For example, future research may use this scale to measure participants’ interactions with artificial intelligence and eudaimonic virtues.

The paper “The Ideal Worker Revisited. A Gender Perspective on Technostress at the Office” by Myriam Gaitsch and Philip Schörpf investigates technology-enabled changes in work practices. The paper examines the potential of flexible work hours and spaces to reconcile private and professional life demands, especially for working mothers. Drawing on technostress literature and empirical data from two case studies capturing distinct conditions of office work, the authors discuss creators of technostress and identify (gendered) strategies for alleviating it. The results of their qualitative content analysis suggest that employees, rather than organizations, carry the burden of technostress management, and mothers are affected at a higher rate. The authors advocate for guidelines regulating, for example, expected response times for out-of-office communication and breaks when working from home. They argue that technology is not an independent force and that its impact on work practices depends on existing norms and social dynamics (e.g., MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999).

Lastly, the paper “Disconnecting in a Digital World: A Practice-based Approach,” co-authored by Merle Pohl, Lauri Wessel, and Jan vom Brocke, explores and reconceptualizes the practice of digital disconnection. The practice of disconnecting through trends such as digital detoxing and smartphone or social media abstinence is widely discussed and often promoted as a measure to restore well-being in a challenging and increasingly digitalized world. However, the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear (e.g., Lemahieu et al., 2025). A central limitation in existing research and the public debate on disconnection is its rather static conceptualization: disconnection is often approached as a static and deliberate act, whereby users voluntarily set clear-cut boundaries between the “offline” and “online.” However, this approach only partially reflects reality, where boundaries between online and offline increasingly blur and users often momentarily—and even unintentionally—enact disconnection in their everyday life (e.g., Klingelhoefer et al., 2024). The paper builds on this notion, drawing on a more dynamic conceptualization of digital well-being (Vanden Abeele, 2021) to propose disconnection as a practice regularly enacted in everyday life, with both intentional and unintentional components. Based on qualitative data, the authors highlight the multidimensionality of digital disconnection. Their findings show that (momentary) disconnection is often driven by temporal, mental-emotional, technical, and spatial factors. The paper outlines promising research pathways, calling for future studies to account for the complex nature of digital disconnection to fully understand its impact on users’ well-being.

We hope that this special issue will initiate a vibrant interdisciplinary debate on the impact of digital solutions on users’ well-being and promote further research efforts and approaches to measuring digitally enabled phenomena. These contributions provide a foundation for regulatory action as well as moving the needle of societal awareness and literacy regarding the role that digital tools can play in users’ mental health.

Acknowledgement and Funding

We would like to thank Daan le Roux, Adrian Meier, and Doug Parry for their kind support of this special issue. This publication was supported by the Weizenbaum Institute (grant number 16DII141), funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and the State of Berlin.

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