It’s no secret that there is a serious mental health problem in Ireland, particularly in Limerick where my fellow Goose, Jon, and I hail from. The main issue with mental health is that a lot of people aren’t willing to speak about it. Some people don’t want to burden their friends and family with their problems. They don’t want to be a downer. They are afraid to show weakness. All of which are false. However, as this is still the case with a lot of people who suffer from mental health, a team of innovative students from Trinity College Dublin have created an app called ‘Keep Appy’ where people can not only log their fitness and diet, but also their mental health. We recently caught up with Aimee from Keep Appy at the recent Dublin Tech Summit who gave us the low-down.
What is Keep Appy?
Keep Appy is an incredible app that acts as a diary for those suffering from mental health. Each day you are asked things like how much sleep did you get, did you exercise today, how is your mood ect. By answering these questions the app with provide you with a range of content to help turn that frown upside down. Whether it’s inspirational quotes, YouTube videos, informative articles or just a simple challenge, the app is designed to help the user understand their mental health better and provide them with the tools to grow.
The app will also give the users challenges to accomplish, each of which are proven to improve mental health. It could be anything from starting a conversation with a stranger, drinking a litre of water a day to simply getting 7 hours of sleep. These challenges are aimed to be stress relievers and to make you feel better physically and mentally.
Create Your Own Goals
Along with their challenges, Keep Appy also allows you to set your own personal goals. If you want to hit a new target in the gym or walk for an extra 10 minutes, even cook a good meal, it’s completely up to you. Keep Appy also has a diary where you can log how your day has been and what positive or negative things happened that resulted in a good or bad day.
If you do have a bad day, you can look back on your progress and diary and see what you did on positive days that made you feel so good about yourself in the hopes of building positive habits to gradually improve your health, physically and mentally.
The important thing to take away from this app is that it is not a replacement for human interaction. If you are feeling low, talk to someone. If you still don’t want to talk to people you know but you need to talk, there is a link within the app to contact the Samaritans and Niteline. This is the amazing thing about Keep Appy. They are not trying to replace these helplines with their app, it’s just a alternative when you don’t feel like talking, and when you do you can get in contact with the right people within the app itself.
The Next Steps
The app is so innovative and groundbreaking that they have been nominated for an Global Social Innovator Challenge (GSIC) award in San Diego, California. If the Irish team manage to win, they will receive further funding to develop the app and help people suffering from mental illness in the future.
It’s important to note that you don’t need to be suffering from mental health problems to use the app. Myself and Jon have both began using it to set ourselves daily and weekly goals, mainly exercise and sleep more. Hopefully this will lead to some success! Success leads to endorphins. And endorphins is what make us happy! And who doesn’t like being happy?!
This is definitely one company to keep an eye out for, we know we will be!
Keep Appy is available on iOS and Android now.
*We here at Goosed take mental health very seriously, we recently took all gambling related articles off out site.If anyone is suffering from depression or having issues with mental health in general always remember you can talk to someone. Contact the Samaritans on 01 671 0071 and you can visit Niteline here where they do great work for students in particular.*