MOOD 24/7

You meet with your clients for fifty minutes a week.  During that time you use your training and skill to assess their mood states. But, what about the rest of the week?  Sure we ask our clients to report on their symptoms.  “So, Mr. E, how have you been feeling since our last session?”  Mr. E gives us a summary of his weeks ups and downs.  Maybe he has excellent recall and we get a full and accurate report.  More often he “forgets” some important details, like that horrible fight he had with his wife where he called her horrible names.   So, we only get a partial view of Mr. E’s week.  Maybe we assign Mr. E a mood log to fill out during the week.  Maybe he does his homework; more often, he doesn’t. If you receive a crisis call between sessions from Mr. E you will have another opportunity re-assess his mood state, but we don’t want that, do we?  What is a tech savvy therapist to do?  

Dr. Adam Kaplin of Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with HealthCentral - a clinical resource and support provider - have developed a simple and elegant solution to help track client mood states outside of the therapy office.  It is called Mood 24/7 -- a secure web application that sends the following text message to the registered user:  “On a scale of 1 to 10 what was your average mood today?” The user responds with a number and an optional comment of up to 160 characters.  The data is transmitted back to the Mood 24/7 secure website, loaded to a secure data repository and used to create a report displaying the users mood patterns over time. 

So, on Mr. E’s next appointment you can sit with him and say, “What happened on Wednesday Mr. E?  Your mood was a 2.”  Now, maybe Mr. E goes on to tell you about that terrible fight with his wife, maybe he doesn’t.   This app will not enhance a client’s motivation to be more honest with you, but it will provide us with more real time data about a client’s emotional well being. 

The rest is up to us.