Feeling lonely or blue? Are you battling depression? TM, ADEM, NMO, and ON cause chemical changes in the brain that make you more susceptible to depression and mood disorders. Do you want to improve the quality of life for you and your loved ones? Mood24/7 is the perfect place to start by providing you with an important tool to better understand your mood and help recognize and treat depression if it is playing a role in your life.

Mood24/7 is a free mood-tracking tool that was co-developed by Dr. Adam Kaplin of Johns Hopkins and HealthCentral. Dr. Kaplin is a TM and MS neuropsychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins MS and TM Centers of Excellence and a physician on the Transverse Myelitis Association Medical Advisory Board.  HealthCentral is the third leading online health company. Together, they have developed Mood24/7 to monitor and track mood daily, not only for personal purposes, but also for use in clinical settings.

The service itself is free and it can be highly beneficial to you if you want to monitor your mood and how it changes over time, even if you have not been diagnosed with clinical depression. In addition to monitoring your daily mood, Mood24/7 permits you to enter a daily note of what else is going on of relevance on any given day. Through its use, you may be able to identify certain stressors in your life that lower your mood.  People who have used Mood24/7 have said that for personal use, Mood24/7 acts as a “guardian angel” and also raises self-awareness of their daily mood.  Because of this, patients are able to actively focus on working to improve their mood.

For some users, using Mood24/7 may lead to the recognition that you may benefit from seeing a mental healthcare provider. It is important to understand that depression affects patients with TM, ADEM, NMO, and ON more than the general population because of chemical changes in the brain due to neuroinflammation (i.e., inflammation affecting the brain); it is not simply a matter of being strong-minded.  Multiple studies have shown that depression is the primary determining factor in a patient’s self-reported quality of life, with greater bearing than other variables investigated, including physical disability, fatigue, and cognitive impairment.  Therefore, getting depression treated is important for your quality of life, which will directly impact the quality of life of your loved ones.

Besides having many personal benefits, Mood24/7 better equips mental healthcare professionals to provide quality care.  If you use it and currently see a mental healthcare provider, you are able to share your daily mood charts that can be accessed online with your mental healthcare provider during consults. This will help your healthcare provider have a better appreciation of how you have been doing, track your actual response to different treatments, and help you instantly show your physician your mood in a graphical format instead of forcing you to waste time on trying to remember events that happened weeks ago.  By using Mood24/7, Dr. Kaplin has found he is able to visualize his patient’s responses to medications.  He can now more accurately assess whether a patient should stay on a medication because it is helping or change a medication because it is doing nothing to improve a patient’s mood.

Mood24/7 is simple to use and requires only seconds a day to use. The user simply chooses a time of day to receive the text and then responds with a number 1 to 10 to symbolize their mood (10 meaning the best mood and 1 meaning the worst mood). After the numerical mood score, users can then enter a space and record whatever other annotations they want, whether it be stressors in their lives or other circumstances.  For clinical purposes, medication changes are particularly important to record. The user then sends out the text and all the data gets stored on a secure server where the information can only be accessed through Mood24/7’s password-protected site by the user or by other people that the user has to specifically designate to share his or her chart with in his or her trusted circle.  Users can select the timeframe over which they want to see their moods graphed out. Again, HealthCentral has plans on keeping Mood24/7 a free service. Your own mobile carrier’s text rates or text quotas will still apply though.

Signing up and starting to track your mood is pretty self-explanatory and simple.  Just sign on to Mood247.com, click the “get started” button, and fill out the required information. Once you finish that, you will be sent a text to your phone with an activation code to associate your account with your phone.  After you insert that code online, your account has been set up.  Within your account you can add people to your “trusted circle” so that they can see your mood reports as well as change the time of day that you receive the daily text.  There is no obligation to continue receiving texts if you don’t want to, and you can stop using Mood24/7 at any time.

Mood24/7 can help you and your loved ones be more aware of your mood and help you to concentrate on the things that can enhance your quality of life.  It is a tool designed with both personal use and clinical use in mind.  Mood24/7 is a way to revolutionize healthcare by using your own cell phone to help organize your ability to track, understand and improve your daily health. Try it today at Mood247.com.