Mobile Apps and Mental Health

Smartphones have proven to be a terrific platform for enabling us to do all kinds of things we could never do before, and now they're being used in the field of mental health. Though not a substitute for one on one sessions with a doctor, smartphone apps can be a valuable and ever present resource that can help you through difficult times and give you access to additional resources as well. The current Future Talk explores the use of mobile technology in promoting mental health, and features two guests. Julia Hoffman is a clinical psychologist and mobile apps lead at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she develops apps to help people with post traumatic stress disorder, and Nicholas Chapa is mobile team lead at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, where the goal is to help people overcome destructive behaviors and replace them with positive healthy ones instead. Even though this entire field of combining mobile technology with mental health is only in its infancy, it's already shown a great deal of promise. If you'd like to view the show in its entirety, please click here. To see it divided into three shorter segments, click here.

Gray Matters

Went to an interesting discussion on the workings of the brain today, titled "Gray Matters",  at Stanford's Maples Pavilion. It was moderated by Juju Chang of ABC News and featured some really interesting panelists, including Bob Woodruff of ABC who went through a long recovery after suffering severe brain injury from a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2006. Brain science is still in its infancy, but more and more people are studying it, addressing questions such as: what are thoughts, how are memories stored, and how can we retain our mental agility. Much of the research is focused on gaining better understanding of ailments of the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease. All of the panelists seemed to feel that the research is moving in the right direction, although there's obviously so much more to be done.