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Friday, December 2, 2016

An Improved Virtual Hope Box: An App for Suicidal Patients

Principal Investigator: Nigel Bush, Ph.D.
Organization: National Center for Telehealth & Technology

One of the key approaches in treating people who are depressed and thinking about suicide is to help them come up with reasons to go on living, and one of the ways that mental health specialists have traditionally done this is to work with their patients to create a “hope box”—a collection of various items that remind the patients that their lives are meaningful and worth living. The items can be anything from photos of loved ones and certificates of past achievements to lists of future aspirations, CDs of relaxing music, and recordings of loved ones offering inspirations thoughts. The hope box itself can take various forms: a real wooden box or shoe box, a manila envelope, a plastic bag, or anything else that the patient chooses. The patient is asked to keep the hope box nearby and use its contents when it seems hard to go on living.

But it is not always easy to keep such a hope box close at hand. A depressed Veteran or service member might find it inconvenient to take the hope box to work, for example, or might forget to bring it along on a trip. For this reason Nigel Bush and his colleagues at the National Center for Telehealth and Technology have designed a “virtual hope box,” a smartphone app that allows the patient to keep all those reasons for living close by at all times.

The entire app description is here.