Sleep Apps

Sleep Apps

Getting better sleep – longer, deeper, more restful – is an important part of managing mental illness and healthy lifestyle.  Lack of sleep, and interrupted sleep, is one of the most common problems mentioned by our clients, and helping people get better sleep is one of our first goals for management of moods and especially major depression. Sleep technology is, …

Mobile Apps for Tracking Moods Improve Care

Passive tracking of vocal and behavioral indicators of symptoms via a smartphone app can be an effective way to improve depression in a time-sensitive and accurate fashion.  A recent randomized clinical trial compared the use of an app to track indicators with “usual” care for depression, and, although the sample size is small, the results are very promising. For the …

Building Healthy Habits – Gina

Building healthy habits can be very important in managing mood. Regular sleep, exercise and diet can play a key role in reinforcing a stable mood. As a result, I regularly work with clients to identify healthy habits they would like to form and steps they can take in doing so. Most of the the time they are core habits such …

App Predicts Mood in Bipolar

App Predicts Mood in Bipolar – Nancy

A new smartphone app predicts mood in bipolar according to a recent series of studies. The mobile phone app shows promise for identifying early warning signals for users of mood episodes, based on a user’s keyboard behavior, such as typing speed and message length. The app does not consider the content of messages typed by users on their phones, but …

Digital Phenotyping

Data Mining for Mental Health – Digital Phenotyping

Digital phenotyping is Tom Insel’s fancy term for using some of the vast amount of data that our cell phones collect about our behavior to try to inform assessments of mental health diagnosis, symptoms and risk. Two years ago an article in JAMA Internal Medicine highlighted significant deficiencies in the way that smartphone-based conversational agents like Siri or Cortona responded to …

Attention Bias Modification

Attention Bias Modification (ABM) – also sometimes called Cognitive Bias Modification – may be an inexpensive and effective way of enhancing standard treatment for social anxiety. The standard approach to social anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on teaching people to modify their thoughts about social situations. First the client is asked to track thoughts before a group …