How Myndgard Share supports university counselling services

Updated October 2026: this article has been rewritten to describe Myndgard Share as it is today. An earlier version described audiences and features that are not part of the product.

Student counselling services sit at the centre of mental health support in Irish higher education. Ireland's National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework, published by the Higher Education Authority in 2020, notes that demand for on-campus counselling "continues to rise annually", and cites international findings that demand for student support services "far exceeds the resources available".

Within that pressure, most counselling still happens in a weekly or fortnightly hour. What happens in the days between is largely invisible to the counsellor until the student describes it in the room. Myndgard Share is built for that gap. This piece sets out what it does, who it is for, and where its limits are.

Who it is for

Share is for students who are already in counselling at their university. It is invitation-only: the counselling service invites a student by email, and it is for adults aged 18 and over. It is not a screening tool for the whole student body, and it does not replace counselling. Students know the app simply as Myndgard.

What students do

In the app, students complete a short daily mood check-in and validated questionnaires such as PHQ-9 (low mood) and GAD-7 (anxiety). They can record movement and mindfulness sessions, and on iPhone they can choose to sync steps, workouts and sleep from Apple Health. That sync is off unless the student turns it on.

PHQ-9 and GAD-7 were chosen because they are brief, familiar to clinicians and well studied. In the original validation study of the PHQ-9, completed by 6,000 patients in primary care and obstetrics-gynaecology clinics in the US, a score of 10 or more had a sensitivity and specificity of 88% for major depression (Kroenke and colleagues, 2001). The GAD-7 was developed and validated with 2,740 adults in 15 US primary care clinics (Spitzer and colleagues, 2006). The HEA framework notes that the PHQ-9 is widely used and freely available, alongside measures such as CORE and CCAPS that many services already use.

These scores are screening measures. They are not a diagnosis, and they do not replace a counsellor's assessment.

What counsellors see

With the student's consent, their assigned counsellor sees check-ins, questionnaire scores and trends in the Myndgard web portal between sessions. A caseload view shows recent scores and check-ins, and each student has a questionnaire history over time. The portal also includes secure messages, homework and treatment plans, with waitlist and team management for service administrators.

When an answer indicates risk, such as thoughts of self-harm, the assigned clinician is alerted so that a person can follow up. Alerts support the clinician's judgement; they do not make decisions on their own. Alerts and messages are not monitored around the clock, and Share is not an emergency service.

Why regular measurement is worth doing

Measuring progress during therapy and feeding it back to the clinician, often called routine outcome monitoring, has a substantial research base, with honest caveats.

A 2018 meta-analysis of 24 studies of two established feedback systems found that two-thirds of the studies showed feedback-assisted therapy outperforming treatment as usual from the same practitioners, with small to moderate effects. Feedback also reduced deterioration among clients predicted to have a poor outcome. A larger 2021 multilevel meta-analysis of 58 studies and 21,699 patients found a smaller effect on symptom reduction (d = 0.15) and a small favourable effect on dropout, and noted that results varied with the instrument used, how often feedback was given and the country where the study took place.

Those studies concern feedback systems in therapy generally, not Myndgard. We make no claim that Share improves clinical outcomes. What the research supports is the practice Share is built around: asking clients short, validated questions regularly and putting the answers in front of the clinician.

Privacy and consent

Because Share holds information about students' mental health, consent and control are built into it:

At first sign-in, students are asked for consent purpose by purpose, and they can change it at any time in Privacy & consent.
Only clinicians assigned to the student see their information, and that access ends when they are no longer assigned.
Students can export their data or delete their account themselves, from their profile.
Data is held in the EU, in Ireland. All traffic is encrypted, and clinical content is additionally encrypted in the database.
There is no advertising or tracking, student data is not sold, and no AI is used to process it.
Notifications are optional, and their text is kept generic so it does not reveal anything on a lock screen.

The full detail is in the Share privacy policy.

What Share does not do

Share does not diagnose, and it is not a treatment in its own right. It does not replace the counselling relationship or the service's own risk procedures, and it is not designed for students who are not in counselling. (Myndgard Discover, a separate and independent product, is an educational programme for students on the waitlist.)

What this means for counselling services

The HEA framework recommends that student services "use data collection systems that cover questionnaires and administrative documents used to track progress and to audit effectiveness and quality". Share is one way to gather between-session information in a form a counsellor can use, with the student's agreement.

If you are considering it, the useful questions are practical ones: how it sits alongside the measures you already use, who in the team receives risk alerts, what happens to an alert outside working hours, and how you will explain consent to students at their first session.

If you're struggling: Samaritans 116 123, text 50808, or 112/999 in an emergency.