Improving mental health with software 🧠💻

I started thinking I was depressed when I had "suicidal ideation" at railway stations. Among my responses was to want to know how bad things were, and so I started to gather stats. Every day, at about bed time, a thing pops up on my laptop to ask me to rate my day on a scale from -10 to +10. I don't have a clear idea what the numbers mean, but it feels like I use them fairly consistently. And I'm not doing science, so I can be as arbitrary as I like.

It feels like a positive, sensible thing to consider how I am. Emotional state can seem overwhelming, but assigning a number requires a moment of contemplative calmness. I noticed that there was a lot of fluctuation. Some of the time life was grim, but some of the time I was ok. Good - I found out something from doing this. The badness always ends. Seems trite, but it's backed up with stats!

Then I noticed that the average value was always about +1. The lows were more extreme, but the mildly positive days outnumbered them. The average was surprisingly consistent. I've had some breaks, but each sequence of data showed the same average. Then a while back it started to creep up. Today I looked for trends. A 7 day average is far too noisy, and 30 days isn't much better, but a 365 day average shows a fairly smooth increase.

Although other steps were required, it feels like this was one step that helped me deal with this stuff.

And today's rating was +1.

#depression

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