Dr. Kreindler: Our group here at Sunnybrook has been trying to develop
useful applications using cell phones and portable computers,
useful applications that will help the delivery of mental health care. One of
the major issues with mental health care, both in general but especially with teens,
is that it's difficult to realize what it
is that you're struggling with. It's difficult to get properly diagnosed. It's difficult to get
connected with someone who can give you to appropriate care, and actually getting through the process
of being cared for can sometimes be difficult too. So, this project got started
a few years ago when I came across Motorola Canada's Raise Your Voice web
site. Raise Your Voice is a project which is being funded by Motorola Canada
to encourage teens who are struggling to speak out and get the
help they need. The partnership between Sunnybrook Psychiatry and Raise Your Voice
is a great one because Raise Your Voice is about encouraging teens to speak out;
we're interested in being able to use cell phone technology to help teens
to get the help that they need. The trick--and what this project is all about--
is around trying to develop the tools so that
getting the help and using the cell phones for
mental health ends up being as easy and painless as possible.
A mood diary is a -- generally a paper-and-pencil chart of how
people are feeling over time. The reason for doing, um, keeping
a mood diary and actually writing it down is that people just don't remember how they feel
very well. If you ask someone how they felt last week, they'll give you an answer but it may
not be an accurate answer, and it may end up ignoring either some of the things which made
them feel better or some of the things which made them feel worse, or it may just not be quite accurate.
And being able to keep an accurate record of how people feel is something which is very
important if you're trying to sort out how they're doing, what the state of their illness
is like, whether or not medications for their illness are doing anything to effectively
treat it or not. If we put a mood diary on a cell phone, it makes it--
the process of keeping a mood diary--a whole lot easier. It means that
since the cell phone is always with them, the mood diary is always with them.
You can set the phone up so that it reminds them that they should be recording
something in the cell phone each day. It makes it easier for the data to get back and forth, they don't need to
take the paper and bring it into the doctor's office. They can just get
it sent in by the internet directly. The study itself involves making daily
entries on the cell phone in the electronic mood record.
Plus, other entries if something significant happens which may have an impact
on their mood. It's a long-term study, which is to say that we're interested in seeing whether
or not teens are willing to use this piece of software over the course of several
months. And what we're really interested in is a couple of things; one is whether or not they're interested
in using it over the course of several months, and also, what it's like for them,
because one of the things which, for example, if you're doing a paper-and-pencil diary,
nobody ever asks them, "Well, do you like doing this?" Or anthing like that.
We know from how teens react to it that in general
most of them don't particularly like that, and we're curious
whether or not using an electronic diary is any more
acceptable, tolerable, enjoyable perhaps, than using
a paper-and-pencil diary over the course of several months.
This project is Motorola Canada's first ever funding for
mental health research, so it's pretty significant that way, and it's great that they were willing to
help us out with this project. You know, it's a great fit, because
teens use cell phones, cell phones are a great tool for being
able to access mental health resources. The trick is just figuring out how to set up
the tools so that contacting the resources or making good use of them is as painless
as possible. And that's what this study is all about. We know that lots of teens out there are
struggling with mental illness. We know that a lot of teens are struggling with mood disorders. If
you have 100 people in your class, by the time you're in your early 20s, 10 of
them will have been having problems with depression, another one will be in the early stages of
having problems with bipolar disorder. The most important message
I would have is that if you feel like you're struggling with something, if things don't seem like
they are going quite right, go to your doctor and talk to them, because they may be able to connect you
with the help, and save you years of having to struggle with it until later in life.