Six Weeks with “Start”: An App for Depression that Tracks Moods & Side-effects

In 2007 after meeting with my psychiatrist, she handed me a few sheets of paper and asked me to track my mood. For each corresponding day there was a box, about eighteen of them stacked vertically, the very top box indicated that you were feeling very manic, and the bottom, very depressed. The goal of the mood tracker was to be able to trace a line from box-to-box, and be able to visualize the patients mood for that past month. Over a few months you would have a clear report on the progression of the disorder.

I found myself frequently losing these sheets of papers, or forgetting to check off the boxes each, and every day. When I asked my doctor if there was another option to track moods she replied “No, sorry.”

Fast forward to 2014, when my doctor handed me the same sheets of paper, the copies now blurred from having been copied so many times over the years. I gave her a look, and asked the same question, is there a better way? To which she replied “no, sorry,” with a laugh. Knowing my preference for technology over paper.

A week ago a new App came across my radar, “Start” marketed as a “Medication manager for depression/ mood & side effect tracker,” describes itself as a tool that “Makes it fast and easy to take your medication and help decide if it’s working as expected for your depression.” The app was developed by the company Iodine, whose mission is to “build tools that help people understand their health and improve their healthcare choices.”

Even thought the app is targeted for those suffering from depression, I decided to give it a trial run and blog about my experience with it. Here’s how the App works and here is how you get started.

First you download the app on your Apple or Android device, once it is downloaded, I recommend enabling notifications so you don’t forget to check-in (it also asks to access your health kit information on your iPhone, I think that’s a bit creepy so I opted out.)

They will first ask you for your demographic information, they then ask you to select the medication you are taking and your dose (you can select more than one medication.) They ask when you started the medication — if you choose a start date over a couple of days — say a week — they let you know that the app works best when you just START a medication and that it is not possible to report the same progress as those who use the app when they take their first dose. However, it does offer that the app can help you track your moods, progress and side effects. For the purpose of this review, I selected that I take Zoloft (which I do not.)

Following this, Start asks you for your personal opinions about taking the medication — how worried you are about side effects etc. They ask you to choose from a few of the following scenarios that led up to you feeling depressed, “It runs in the family, stress or life change, illness or injury, traumatic experience, having a baby, not sure or nothing in particular.”

I chose, “It runs in the family.’’

Start then asks you to choose the things that matter to you and want to improve in two areas, which they will track the progress: 1. Sleep, energy and concentration, and 2. Life, relationship and sex.

Now that you’ve handed them the full monty they finish by asking you to sign-up for an account with your email, while promising that they do not have a company with drug companies (but who do they have a relationship with and how do they make money? I’ll come back to this.)

Once you sign-in, you start your first check-in. The check-in is the PHQ-9 Test, a brief test of nine questions that is used to diagnosis the severity of depression. The patient or the user is asked to answer question such as, “Over the past 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems: feeling tired or having little energy.” The user is given the option to respond by selecting one of the following, “Not at all, several days, more than half the days and nearly every day.”

When I finished the quiz, I was scored an 11, which notified me that I was feeling “Moderately depressed,” and that I have been feeling that way for the past two weeks. Accurate.

After I thanked the green box for the tips I was directed to a chart of what I might expect when taking my chosen medication, Zoloft.

I did appreciate the simplicity of this and the helpfulness. If I had been starting a new medication it would have saved me the trouble of reading the insert that comes with the medication, the one I always throw out with my old bottle, the one I never read.

So for now, after I finished my check-in the only thing next to do is wait…

See you in two weeks!