Show HN: Open Source Generalized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on iOS
getquirk.app
getquirk.app
CBT is an extremely effective, evidence based way of treating many mental health disorders including depression and panic disorder.
It's also a fantastic way of reevaluating biases. It can be extremely effective at getting to you really evaluate points in your life when something you've thought is illogically affecting your mood. For example,
> Wow that demo went terribly, everyone must think I'm a dumbass.
It's really easy for us to let these thoughts take over the rest of us. We tend to find ourselves repeating events that make us angry, guilty, or afraid as if they were movies in our brains. That can mess with our opinions of others and cause us undue stress and discomfort.
Instead, CBT will ask us to list the cognitive distortions and then challenge this belief. So for the thought above, we'll say it's:
* mind reading (since we don't know what other people think)
* catastrophizing (since we're implicitly assuming something terrible could happen because our demo went poorly)
Then, it will ask us to come up with a "better" or "alternative" thought like this:
> That demo went poorly, but I'll do better next time and I'm glad I learned from it!
That may seem silly, but the act of writing it down helps you notice when your thoughts are taking too much control over your life. And the act of challenging it helps train your brain to "automatically" think better thoughts in the future.
For some, these negative thoughts control much of their life and we may consider that a form of pathology. But for many of us, it's just a part of our monkey brains we'd like to deal with better.
Quirk is made with both uses in mind. It's general enough that it can be used for any condition. It started as a prototype I build just for me, but I hope it's useful to others as well. It was built to only incorporate the evidence backed treatments. Many apps overly couple CBT with "relaxation tapes" or other untested treatments. Quirk is as slimmed down as possible.
If you don't want to pay the 2 dollars, Quirk is open source and you're welcome to build it yourself. Here's a couple promo codes as well though:
NM4MKLPYNPNL YMWAXHMKJYA3 A3NALPLLM7LK P4EYRPPX37PM 9TP9P9F6NMWN YKLJK7N7PH3E 4RP3RJJTRRER W6MAYR7JM7HH L76NMLP9PXLT L7A9PLTNKPN7
And if you need to talk, or just have questions about quirk. Feel free to email me: quirk @ econn.info
> Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).
It also found it to be effective in nicotine cessation and other addictive behaviors:
> Treatments for smoking cessation found that coping skills, which were partially based on CBT techniques, were highly effective in reducing relapse in a community sample of nicotine quitters (Song, Huttunen-Lenz, & Holland, 2010), and another meta-analysis noted superiority of CBT (either alone or in combination with nicotine replacement therapy) over nicotine replacement therapy alone (Garcia-Vera & Sanz, 2006).
In anxiety disorders, studies found them to be effective "first line" approaches, including when the CBT was delivered over the internet:
> In general, CBT is a reliable first-line approach for treatment of this class of disorders (Hofmann & Smits, 2008), with support for significant positive effects of CBT on secondary symptoms such as sleep dysfunction and anxiety sensitivity (Ghahramanlou, 2003). Further, internet-delivered or guided self-help CBT showed some promise in immediate symptom relief as compared to no treatment, but the long-term maintenance with this modality of CBT remains unclear (Öst, 2008; Coull & Morris, 2011).
Also, the meta-analysis also found it to be effective for:
* insomnia
* anger and aggression
* general stress
and many other disorders.