PsychEducation.org (home)
iCharting: Web and Phone Applications for Mood
Tracking
revised 6/30/2011
Update 2/2012: suppose all you wanted to do was rate your mood every
day (not sleep, exercise, or anxiety). That might make it so simple you'd
actually do it most of the time! For that, there's a free simple clean
program, web or iPhone (and Android "coming soon"). MoodPanda.
If you want to chart mood and sleep and anxiety, and have your
fully private results support
a research effort (with daily reminders to chart, which is nice if you need it
and can be turned off if you don't) , you want BeatingBipolar. They have
iPhone and Android versions. You can have your medical provider look at
your chart in advance of a visit by sending your log-in info.
If you wish, you can go back to 2010, the dark ages, to my previous report on all this:
Here is a late-2010 assessment by an experienced
user. Thank you Cyclothymia. I can't comment on her evaluations because I have
even less experience with the products, but you'll find this a useful summary. I
have no relationship with any of these companies.
If you find a really good electronic moodcharting system that's free or costs less than $15, email
me please, and if the product looks good to me I will post a note about it
here. In the meantime there's also my clunky Excel
program; the price is right
(free, no strings)...
Cyclothymia comments below on:
ChronoRecord bStable
Optimism products Moodifi
Medhelp Android/Blackberry
apps PsychCentral
Moodtracker
ChronoRecord is only available on the Windows Platform. (I haven't tried it
yet.)
bStable is now available, for Windows and Mac, starting from $99. It
looks really amazing but I haven't had the chance to try it for real.
Optimism is available not only as an iPhone/iPod app, but also as a web
client, or a software version for both Windows and Mac for $39.95. I've
been trialing this and while it's reasonably powerful and has the great idea
of including common triggers etc., it does not handle mixed states at all!
(Kind of a deal breaker if you have mixed states).
There are a lot of iPhone/iPod apps that will do mood tracking but most of
them are pretty useless IMO...
Moodifi is a reasonable one. You can take
tests that will assess your mood (although tests often don't quite capture
your level of psychic pain) -- depression, anxiety and mania, as well as test
for functioning, medication and substance. I actually don't like it much
personally, but it has a cool feature where you input the numbers of a friend,
family member, your therapist and an emergency number so when you report
suicidal ideation it immediately brings up a list asking if you'd like to call
someone, and you can just touch the label to call.
MedHelp have their own mood tracker (
http://www.medhelp.org/land/mood-tracker)
which is alright but I don't think it's very well organised visually (I always
feel like you should be able to understand a graph very quickly when you look
at it).
The Psych Central Mood Tracker (
http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/mood-tracker/index.php) has
a really nice visual organisation, but it uses tests rather than human
judgement so today it "diagnosed" me as manic when I'm really on the
depressed side of mixed (I don't think it does mixed states though).
Really the best mood tracker I've used is
moodtracker.com
-- it's not "pretty" but it's functional enough, handles mixed
states, tracks sleep, medication and menstruation, and the visual organisation
is reasonable. Unfortunately I only recommend it because it is a matter
of "it sucks less than the rest of the ones I can afford".