App rec: BoosterBuddy

[ysobel]

There is an iOS app that I've been using for about a month now, and it may be of interest to some of y'all. It's called BoosterBuddy, and it is a free (and ad-less!) app created by Vancouver Island Health Authority to "help teens and young adults improve their mental health".

The premise is this: you check in every day with how you are feeling (broadly speaking -- the options are great, not greasy, struggling, and crisis), and then you have a cartoonish animal buddy that you wake up by doing three quests. (The nature of the quests depend on how your mood is at check-in, and can be anything from "look up pictures of beach scenes" to "figure out something you need to do, break it down into steps as small as possible, and write down the first step" to "take a picture of something beautiful" to various other things. Nothing that takes long, and many come with an "I can't do this now" option that switches to a different quest.

Once the animal buddy is awake, it gives you an inspirational quote of some sort, and you can play dress-up with various hats, neck things, belts, etc. You unlock new clothing items with in-game coins that you get for doing quests, taking medications, adding to-do items to the in-game calendar, completing said tasks, etc. There is also a list/collection of coping strategies that you can go to at any time, with a Favorites list so that you can flag your favorite strategies.

Setup involves marking the issues that you have problems with (out of a list including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, initiation/motivation, oversleeping, under sleeping, drug or alcohol use, nicotine use, and other things I can't remember), which I think are used by the app to select what quests it gives you; how many times a day you take medications and whether you would like a reminder to do so; and crisis contact info like the address/number of the nearest hospital (and, iirc, the option of listing the name and phone number of someone such as a therapist or friend that you can call in an emergency).

There is the option of sending in anonymized usage data -- nothing personal, not the contents of what you write, but things like minutes spent in the app, which coping mechanisms you use, how often you check in, how often you complete the daily quests, etc -- but this is opt-IN, which I love, and permission can be revoked at any time.

I find it super helpful both for the daily quests (small daily coping reminders) and for when I'm struggling with brainweasels and need one of the on-demand coping mechanisms. You can also see a monthly calendar view that shows among other things which days you checked in *and what mood*, which is a very granular look at my emotion trends (the mood is selected once per day and can't be changed). It also shows when you took your meds, or at least when you told it you took your meds (and this *can* be changed after the fact; even if it's a different day you can go back and mark the med as taken).

The only gripes I have are a) you can't look at previous answers to fill-in-the-blank coping methods (which I suspect is because the app doesn't even store them; good for privacy, and the primary point is mindfulness rather than dwelling on the past), b) you can change settings (like which issues are issues for you) but you can't see what the current settings are, and c) it is occasionally physically ableist (one daily quest was "take three steps" and unlike most, it didn't have the "I can't do this now" option). But overall I would give it an A, especially for a free app. (And it is actually legitly free; no ads, no in-app purchases, just plain free.)

Sorry for the teal deer. If you've read this far, you deserve a kitty pic:

Comments

[synecdochic]

KITTY

[ephemera]

That sounds like a nifty app - thank you for spreading the word! (There's an Android version as well - installing now ...)

(Also - KITTY!)

[zhelana]

I'm sure you meant "not great" but when I read "not greasy" I thought of a health and wellness group for schizophrenics I'm a part of where that could be a legitimate answer to how are you meaning something like "I feel like shit but at least I took a shower" since so many schizophrenics skip showers a little too frequently and bathing is one of the main goals of the group. :)

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the rec -- sounds like right up my alley.

[patchwork_owl]

Thank you so much for the app rec! I've been slogging my way through a downswing the last few months, so it couldn't come at a better time. I've played with it for a couple of days, and I really like the bite-sized quests and the fact that you can have it poke you with reminders to do stuff. My phone's calendar has the same function, but entering to-dos is WAY less effort in the app. Also the "buddy" is really cute.