Text Messaging Your Moods: <3 It or H8 It?

by Josie Raymond · 2010-02-03 10:22:00 UTC
Topics:

A new website aims to be the diary for your mood. HealthCentral developed Mood 24/7 "based on technology licensed exclusively from Johns Hopkins University." Free while it's still in beta, Mood 24/7 is for people who'd like to keep track of how they're feeling on a daily basis. After someone signs up, the website sends her a text message once a day asking her to rate her mood at the moment. The website compiles these ratings into charts that she can print out and take to her doctor, psychologist or book club. Physicians can also sign up for their own accounts to check up on patients' ratings. The site is affiliated not with Johns Hopkins, but with one of the school's professors of psychiatry and neurology, Dr. Adam Kaplin.

HealthCentral is touting Mood 24/7's potential as a tool to identify depression and evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. My problem with using a mood chart, or a self-reported text message rating, is that it doesn't much matter whether you rate yourself a 1 (lowest) or 3 (pretty low) -- if you're not feeling good at all, you need to see a doctor. Likewise, if your medication brings you to a 5 (neutral) or a six (OK), it's time to talk to your doctor about switching up the dosage or adding an exercise plan. People know what they're feeling, and, even if the ratings fall above or below some arbitrary threshold, shouldn't be told that they're not sick even if they know they are, or that they are sick when they know they're not.

I signed up for Mood 24/7 today (which took about a minute) and programmed the text to come to me at 1 p.m. I hadn't had lunch yet and I was behind on my deadline, so my mood wasn't good. The message read: "On a scale of 1(lo) to 10(hi) what was your average mood today?" I had the choice to add a short message with my reply. So I answered: "MOOD 6 stressed." If I were suffering from clinical depression or bipolar disorder, would my hunger and external stressors have any less impact on my subjective daily mood report? I'd love to hear from doctors and patients both for and against this text message reporting. Has my criticism put anyone in a bad mood?

Photo credit: DCvision2006

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Surgeon General Says Obesity A Result of Poor Choices
NEXT STORY:
Why I'm Asking Aetna to Cover My Surgery

COMMENTS (1)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.