MENTAL HEALTH
can be analysed and used to form conclu- sions about the public’s emotional and mental wellbeing.
Cousins said: “We’ve already got about 700,000 daily scores and each daily score is actually 20 sub scores, so that’s a huge number – 14,000,000 responses. I would say its one of the world’s biggest collections of mood data and there is potential to start using that data and to be able to start mak- ing predictions. Moodscope could become a tool that will have a reasonably good idea of how you’re going to be tomorrow, given how you’ve been today.
CPN every Thursday, but is having difficul- ties on another day, then the CPN can ar- range to see them at a time that is probably more helpful.”
Flexibility
This more flexible approach would allow healthcare professionals to focus their at- tention and care on people who most need their help, when they need it, instead of seeing patients regularly, regardless of their need.
Cousins said: “One of the issues with men- tal health problems for many is that they can be intermittent; they are not neces- sarily there all the time and when they are bad, people really do need help. It’s such a massive problem that’s getting bigger and bigger all the time, so many people are pre- senting with mental health problems.”
Equal attention
The issue of co-morbidity, where people who have a problem with one particular health issue often have a related mental health problem alongside it, is an increas- ingly relevant notion that suggests mental illness deserves equal attention as that devoted to physical illness and harm. This has been reflected in the Government’s ‘No Health without Mental Health’ strategy, published earlier this year.
Cousins said: “Patients with cancer, for in- stance, are often, for obvious reasons, going to be depressed. If you’re on strong medica- tion for one particular illness, then mixing in anti-depressants as well could make things complicated. So any way of giving people a tool to help them, which may not necessarily mean medication, has got to be good.”
It has been suggested that using Mood- scope in conjunction with more traditional drug-based therapies can enhance the ef- fectiveness of these treatments. Cousins explained that this is because “people can
see what’s happening”.
He compared the idea of Moodscope to WeightWatchers; both are tools for meas- uring people’s progress that are more ef- fective when shared with others. Charting changes provides individuals with further control over their moods, and sharing re- sults with trusted friends can boost these positive effects.
Slow down
In order to encourage users to record their mood regularly, it is important to make the site look and feel appealing to use. This in- cludes a key aspect of Moodscope, which makes the process of recording your mood slightly slower than necessary in order to guarantee significant reflection.
Cousins said: “We’re fairly sure that en- couraging people to slow down just for a couple of minutes and to reflect upon the emotions that Moodscope measures, seems to be part of the process itself. It isn’t just getting a score, it’s also that you’re becom- ing more self-aware.
“Some of the psychologists I’ve spoken to have suggested that there may be some value in the visio-spatial flipping of cards that might connect into a more emotionally heavy part of the brain. If you’re playing with a card, flipping it backwards and for- wards, that puts you into a more reflective state of mind.”
Cousins said that in our modern society “everybody wants to do everything quickly” – but rushing around without stopping to properly think about how you feel can be detrimental; sometimes more time is neces- sary to focus and reflect. “There’s huge value in getting people to slow down,” he added.
Opportunities
The amount of information Moodscope ac- cumulates each day is huge; and this data
“There’s huge potential in looking into cat- egorising and classifying people in different ways; every time somebody records a score they’re actually contributing to a resource that’s going to be of huge value for the greater good.”
Going premium
As Moodscope evolves, a premium version is being developed to offer users additional tools and functionality to measure their mood. However, Cousins promised that the free version would continue to exist, un- changed, to allow users who are unable or unwilling to pay to keep using the service.
One new addition in the paid-for version is the ‘effect-o-gram’, which presents a heat map of an individual’s underlying emo- tions, providing a visual representation of emotions, allowing the user to see mood changes over time.
He said: “That has great value in starting to identify not just the fact that people have been changing over time, but how they’ve been changing and why.”
Another tool is called the trigger-gram, which produces word clouds to show the frequency of words used to describe peo- ples’ best and worst days. The software would uncover repeating triggers in the an- notations users add to their mood graphs, which can then be explored in more de- tail. Highlighting events that cause certain moods will enable individuals to talk about those issues and attempt to find a solution.
Finally, changes to the way members can correspond with their buddies will be up- dated to resemble social networking plat- forms, with messages appearing in a series of threaded exchanges. This improvement will help keep the buddy up-to-date about an individual’s circumstances.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.moodscope.com
national health executive Nov/Dec 11 | 47
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