The Core Benefit of FluidMind
Written on September 9th, 2024 by Charlie
5 min read
The most common question I get about FluidMind (available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store) is: “once the app tells me my depression (or alike) is acting up, then what?” What exactly is the purpose of FluidMind? To answer this question, we have to step back in the process.
Meet Selena
Consider someone with a severe mental illness, such as bipolar disorder - let’s call her Selena. This disorder is characterized by episodic depression and mania, both of which can have grave consequences for those who suffer with this condition: a lost job, a divorce, a hospitalization, psychosis, or even a suicide attempt. Avoiding these traumatic outcomes is a major goal in the modern treatment of mental illness.
Selena is currently euthymic. With past treatment, she is living her life with minimal symptoms: she’s keeping down a full-time job, she has a healthy relationship, and she hasn’t had symptoms of psychosis for well over a year. But then something changes for Selena.
The Prodrome
She starts to sleep less, but still feels energized and highly motivated. She thinks, “well, work is stressful right now, so I’ve had to go to bed later and wake up earlier and keep my motivation strong.” As her lack of sleep progresses, her thoughts start to become distorted.
Selena starts to get many ideas all at once, so rapidly that she can barely keep up, and all of them seem brilliant to her, almost like they are personal revelations. She thinks, “wow, I’m going through a period of deep spiritual growth right now, and I feel great!” However real this feels to her, in this case, she’s slipping into the early phases of a manic episode.
Because of the nature of bipolar disorder, the distortion in thought impairs her ability to realize that what she’s experiencing is actually mania. This is known as “anosognosia” - the inability for the brain to identify, due to its malfunctioning, that it is malfunctioning. As a result, she believes what she’s experiencing to be normal, or at least reasonable considering her situation.
The Climax
There are two possible paths for Selena:
- She cannot identify that she needs medical attention, and as a result, she does not seek treatment and her symptoms worsen. She starts to believe that she is the reincarnation of a prophet, and that her thoughts are being projected into people’s minds. She enters the delusional phase of the psychosis which is accompanying her mania. Not before long, she becomes paranoid that people are following her and plotting against her, and this ultimately leads to a hospitalization. She loses her job, her partner can’t handle the stress, and she becomes suicidal. It takes her years to recover.
or,
- She is warned early, by an independent system which has minimal bias, that her manic symptoms are flaring up. Selena then decides to follow up with a doctor, and with the appropriate medical intervention, she pulls out of the manic episode without any serious psychotic symptoms. She keeps her job and her partner, regains her confidence, and evades years of trauma.
FluidMind is that system.
By using FluidMind consistently, the user is able to keep track of the severity of their symptoms. They can measure, on a daily basis, how intense their depression, anxiety, mania, dissociation, and/or substance abuse has become. A main advantage of FluidMind is that it is, in part, an objective system which does not rely on the self-reporting of one’s mood, but instead relies on the answers to preset questions.
Rewind
Let’s go back in time. For Selena, she begins to keep track of her manic symptoms through her daily use of FluidMind. Once her symptoms flare up, such as neurovegetative symptoms like insomnia or cognitive symptoms like flight of ideas, she can assess the severity while she still has insight and anosognosia has not taken over, and report back to her care team. She thinks, “something seems wrong, these numbers are not encouraging, I should go see my doctor to get clarification.”
Armed with this information, her care team can assess her and they conclude that more treatment (such as an adjustment in medication, the introduction of a new therapy, or a major lifestyle change) is needed. From there, her mania scores on FluidMind start to decrease as her symptoms dampen, and she avoids all the major consequences of a fully-blown manic episode with psychotic features.
The Benefit
FluidMind can tell you when your mental illness is acting up when you cannot yet identify that this is the case. Many people are in denial about their mental health or have anosognosia in severe cases, and FluidMind is an antidote.
What the user decides to do when a symptom score starts to increase is up to them, but now they are working with more information and insight into their mental illness with the help of FluidMind. That is the core benefit of FluidMind.
As a developer, and someone waging a crusade against mental illness, if I can get even one person to evade a major episode of mental illness through the use of FluidMind, then that will be a great success. Mental illness causes serious suffering and dysfunction in one’s life, and we need more tools to combat the devastating effects of these disorders. FluidMind is just one of these many tools which I plan to build at Euthymia Technologies.
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