Pete, that’s at least an interesting idea of using the Quantified Self stuff for mental health. Something I never thought of so far. There tons of tracking possibilities (e.g. people in a depressive phase often lose or gain weight — enter the Withings Scale or similar products). There are already programs that track you activity on the computer for automatic timekeeping. If you can integrate with them, you can also detect patterns of social media overuse or media binge watching.

It should also have a “deadman switch” and “time-out”. If you go on a vacation or are otherwise not able to log or your patterns will be different. So you need to be able to tell the app that there will be a “time-out” coming. And if you don’t log data for some time without a time-out, the “deadman switch” engages and fires off messages as well.

I don’t know if it would be for me personally as a manual form — I’m bad at tracking at the best of times — but with the right automatic tracking, it could at least help me to detect behaviour patterns that are either alarm signals or at best to keep me on track with the stuff that keeps me away from depression. So analysis and prevention are possible applications for this.

If you go ahead with this, I might be able to help out a bit. I’m a technical writer by trade, suffer myself from depression and also have read quite a bit about the whole thing (although my current angle on prevention is MBCT — Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy). If you’re interested, just contact me. No charge :)