ADHD and iPhone app for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

All children today are immersed in electronic gadgetry and children with ADHD are no different. Some ADHD symptoms can be improved using the electronic gadgets that our children love. Phone applications and computer software programs are now available to help combat the symptoms of anxiety, depression, faulty working memory and distractibility. As long as our ADHD children are immersed in their various gadgets we might as well use them to combat some of the ADHD symptoms that are so problematic.

With this in mind, I have recently been looking into mental health phone apps with the mind to find any and all apps that might help ADHD. There are some very interesting inexpensive applications that can be used to treat ADHD that can be loaded onto an iPhone or iTouch. I want to tell you about one today that I found useful to use with my Hyperactive/Impulsive ADHD son who tends to be pervasively negative.

This is an app called eCBT mood made by a company called: mymindapps.com/. The app is an electronic or computer based cognitive behavioral therapy program for the iPhone and iPod. They actually have three programs, one program for depression or mood, one for post-traumatic stress and one designed to help anxiety.

These apps are not fantastic but they are amazingly cheap and are interestingly useful if for nothing more than their portability. For ninety-nine cents you get an overview of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, you get an assessment to determine your negative thought, you get a daily and weekly mood questionnaire and you get the ability to track your mood over a period of time.

In addition to all this, you get a tool box that helps you recognize your automatic negative thoughts and other negative though processes. The app will also connect you to a site where you can find a therapist and to another site where you can find depression or anxiety support groups.

My nine year old son was easily able to read the eCBT mood information on the app and readily took the depression questionnaire for the day. His score showed that he had 5-6 thought processes that were negative and that he was mildly depressed.

A separate section of the application gave him some useful strategies that he could use top change his negative thought. We were able to talk about how his negative thoughts play into his mood and talk about the strategies that he could use to get rid of the negative thoughts that were worsening his mood.

I thought the program would have been better if it had more in the way of strategy suggestions to combat negative thinking but it is probably more useful to go to the trouble of trying to figure out a strategy that is all your own.

This app is not therapy but it is educational and informative. It is also something that can be easily and quickly referred to as it is likely to be in their rooms or in their pockets. I can now tell my sons to refer to their eCBT tool box when they are falling into negative thought traps like all or none thinking or generally deciding that they are worthless because they had a bad day.

This same company has three mental health applications that can be used to treat mental health problems, the name of the apps are eCBT mood for depression, eCBT calm for anxiety and eCBT trauma for post traumatic stress. As I said before, these apps are not a substitute for therapy and it probably isn't a good substitute for a complete online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but I found these little apps somewhat useful and feel that they are probably worth every bit of 99 cents.

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