Mood tracking app for iPhone

November 13, 2013 1:08 PM

My young adult daughter, who suffers from depression, was advised by her therapist to track her moods, to be better able to identify what triggers them. I suggested that she use an iPhone app, since she has her phone with her at all times. Does anyone have a recommendation for a specific mood tracking app?

I did find this AskMeFi thread that suggests some apps, but it is from 2010, so I thought it would be worthwhile to post this new question. Sorry if I have missed a more recent question addressing this issue!

posted by merejane to Health & Fitness (9 answers total)

T2 Mood Tracker (also available on Android).

T2 Mood Tracker is designed to help you track your emotional experience over time and to provide you with a tool to share this information with your health care provider.

This app comes with six pre-loaded issues: anxiety, depression, general well-being, head injury, post-traumatic stress, and stress. You can also add customized scales on any topic (e.g., a pain scale).

You use simple sliders to rate yourself on these behavioral categories and the app automatically graphs your inputs. You can also make notes describing things that happened during the day that may have affected your moods. This provides you and your health care provider with a complete tool to help you uncover patterns in how you are feeling. It may also help you to evaluate the impact of daily events or the effects of treatment on your mood.

It was developed by the DoD to assist and support soldiers in their life transitions after returning home from their service (hence its inclusion of the 'head injury' tracking category) but it is also great for civilians. Very thorough and easy to update, and there's even a PDF/CSV reporting tool that will let her create charts she can print and show to her therapist.
posted by divined by radio at 1:15 PM on November 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Just a quick pointer to this thread, which mentions an upcoming mood tracking app that might be of interest.
posted by MuffinMan at 1:20 PM on November 13, 2013

I'm not currently using it (doing talk therapy now), but MoodKit is a comprehensive CBT app. It has a mood-tracking feature. You rate your mood and can attach a note to it. And it can chart your mood as well.
posted by O9scar at 1:22 PM on November 13, 2013

I've heard good things about Senti. It works by sending you a few questions a couple times a day in order to assess your mood.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 1:42 PM on November 13, 2013

To a large extent it depends on her preferences. Despite the intimidating name, I like this app because it's really simple, totally non-woo and I like the ease of the rating screen. It does a data gathering job and it doesn't involve dumb pictures, rainbows, unicorns, emailing me happy thoughts or a mood rating gauntlet that's three screen long in doing it.

Other people really want to engage in that sort of thing and totally want a full set of "tools" for moods or really nuanced tracking. She is going to need to look at apps to figure out how she wants to roll.

My preferred app isn't available for Apple products but my point really is that she should look at a wide range of apps because it's quite a personal decision and there are a wide range of product approaches.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:43 PM on November 13, 2013

I recommend iMoodJournal, based on your question I think that app has all the features you are looking for. Caveat: I own the app but haven't used it yet.
posted by Rob Rockets at 6:44 PM on November 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

imoodjournal is nice and simple. Gives you a notification at night, you click on a scale that fills the entire screen, write an optional note, you're done for the day! Easy peasy.
posted by Yowser at 2:56 AM on November 14, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, for all the suggestions! I will pass these on to my daughter, and have her check them out.

If she chooses one of these, I might come back and mark the answer that suggested it as a Best Answer. But I'm not sure that makes sense, because as DarlingBri points out, it is a personal decision; the app that my daughter chooses might not be the app that someone else would choose.

On a quick perusal of the links, all these apps sound interesting and helpful, so I appreciate all the responses. But I do want to give a shout-out to MuffinMan's link to the thread about a possible future app; I would not have found that one from an App Store search! Megami's link to the Period Tracker app is also uniquely helpful, as I would have skipped right over that in an App Store search.

I might check all these apps out for myself as well. Even without the depression issue, I think it could be interesting to chart my moods. Senti looks especially intriguing to me.

Thanks again, everyone!
posted by merejane at 12:30 PM on November 14, 2013

Also, Mood Panda!
posted by Draccy at 7:18 AM on November 17, 2013