✨🐙 FreeCBT.

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FreeCBT (a fork of Quirk) is a crossplatform, GPL-licensed, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) app built in React Native / Expo.

Unlike many CBT apps, it's fairly unbiased in what you use it for; it doesn't ask about your mood or ask you to do depression-specific CBT exercises. That makes it fairly quick and discreet to use, especially in a public setting.

Contributors

Some amazing folks have helped build the FreeCBT you see today.

• @Flaque for creating Quirk 🔥🔥
• @devinroche for setting up translation and stepping up as a core maintainer 🔥
• @devilcius for the amazing Spanish translation 🇪🇸
• @idnovic for the amazing German translation 🇩🇪 (and the iPad support!)
• @kwierbol for the amazing Polish translation 🇵🇱
• @Walther for the amazing Finnish translation 🇫🇮
• @Jos512 for the amazing Dutch translation 🇳🇱
• @jinto for the amazing Korean translation 🇰🇷
• @briankung for the Chinese 🇨🇳 localization, internationalization support and helping guide the entire translation effort. 🎉
• @akinariobi for the Russian translation 🇷🇺
• @miguelmf for the Portugese translation 🇵🇹
• @comradekingu for the Norweigan Bokmål translation 🇳🇴
• @micheleriva for the Italian translation 🇮🇹
• @Jolg42 for the French translation 🇫🇷
• @Buricescu for the Romanian translation 🇷🇴

Running Locally

FreeCBT is built on React Native and therefore assumes you have node installed. Yarn is preferred over NPM as a package manager.

# clone the project and cd into it
git clone [email protected]:erosson/freecbt.git; cd ./freecbt

# install dependencies
yarn

# start development environment
yarn start

You'll then be in the expo development environment. If you already have XCode installed with a simulator, you can just press i to start it.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details!

Can I help?

Of course!

If you like the app, go give it 5 stars! It helps more people find the app.

If you're a mental health professional, audit the descriptions of the cognitive distortions. If you have suggestions, let me know and we'll change stuff!

If you can draw and can make digital illustrations of the little blobs, let me know and I'll find a place to stick them in the app!

If you know a language other than English, help us translate the app!

FreeCBT and Quirk

FreeCBT is based on Quirk's code. Why did I create a fork?

• Keep Quirk alive. Quirk is a well-designed piece of software that is, sadly, no longer maintained. The single most important reason this fork exists is so a Quirk-like app can continue to exist.

• Zero cost, zero ads. FreeCBT will be free. I want FreeCBT to help as many people as possible, the way Quirk helped me. Ads and tracking would risk hurting vulnerable people more than helping; a paywall would sharply reduce the number of people this app helps.

  The obvious trade-off is that FreeCBT makes its maintainer no money. I think FreeCBT is important enough to work on anyway. There is a less obvious trade-off that affects you: I can spend less time/energy/money working on FreeCBT than Quirk's developer spent working on Quirk, which leads to...

• No major new features. Quirk already works very well. I want to keep things working well, avoid bloat, and - as explained above - keep development time/costs low. Every new feature puts those things at risk.

Design

FreeCBT's - originally Quirk's - goal is to be both inviting and focused. It should be really easy to enter in a thought; people frequently enter these in public settings and need to do it fairly quickly. It also should not cause any increased frustration.

Design Logic

FreeCBT is built with two main goals in mind:

• Don't be bloated
• Don't be evil

Don't be bloated

Don't include features for one particular condition at the expense of other conditions. For example, don't couple mood tracking to thought tracking. If a user has to enter a mood in order to track a thought, then the entire app is ruined for people who use it for panic, OCD or another condition where mood isn't the primary focus.

Don't include non-CBT related treatments without good reason. No relaxation audio tracks or meditation guides. It's a CBT app, keep it focused on CBT.

Don't include things that could be better accomplished by another app. No one needs an in-app diary when a diary works just fine. No one needs an in-app heart rate tracker when a heart rate tracker works just fine.

Be quick and efficient. Thoughts shouldn't take 5 minutes to enter and you should be able to skip fields if it's reasonable. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't be Evil

Thoughts are more valuable than passwords, treat them that way. Most people would rather give over their passwords than their CBT thoughts. They're incredibly private, occasionally involve other people, and frequently are embarrassing.

Don't have $200 dollar in app purchases. I'm looking at you CBT Thought Diary. I get it, developers need to make money. It costs a lot to just keep the app on the app store. But you're preying on vulnerable people. Very few people of rational mind will purposely spend $200s for a dark mode.

Don't have dumb notifications. Scheduling is fine, abusing push notifications so your app has better traffic is scummy and gross.

Be open. Not every app has to be open source; it's a hard choice to make. But be clear and obvious within the app about what's going on with the user's data. Don't be sending it to some server without making that clear within the app, especially if it's not providing any extra utility to the user.

Don't push people to be unhappy. Do not purposefully or accidentally force people to be unhappy to use their app. Don't force people to state their unhappy in order to access a feature. It's easy for this to sneak up in the design, if a user has to rate their happiness below average in order to access the CBT features, you're asking them to be unhappy to use your app.

Be extremely cautious about making engagement your core metric. User engagement is fine to be concerned about. We all want people who need help to be actually engaging in the help. But holy moly becareful about this. You do not want to drive something that is for many people a treatment into a self-perpetuating engagement loop. A ruthless focus on engagement has caused many a product to become skinner boxes. No one should ever be addicted to your mental health app.

Engineering Logic

FreeCBT must not lose user data. The entire point of the app is to record your thoughts, so if you lost them it would be pretty bad. As stated in one study:

While an app failure in general can be inconvenient and annoying, it can have serious consequences in the context of mental health apps—someone who has come to rely on an app for emotional support can find a failure “devastating.”

Therefore, data management should be given a higher priority than any other part of the app.

Taxonomy and Order of Data Failure Cases

The following is a list of extremely bad behaviors and states that could happen in order of severity.

1 - Large Scale Data Corruption

All thoughts have been corrupted somehow. For example, the JSON format of every item is wrong. This is put at the top because not only can a user not access the data, but it may spiral out can cause continuing errors forcing the app to be "bricked."

2 - Large Scale Data Loss

All thoughts have been deleted without any hope of recovery.

3 - Small Scale Data Loss

A small amount of data has been deleted without any hope of recovery.

4 - Small Scale Data Corruption

A small amount of data has been corrupted in a recoverable way. The user still has lost data, but the app does not crash, and this is potentially fixable via an update.

License

FreeCBT is licensed under the GPL, which guarantees end users the freedom to study, share, and modify the software.

Note that this license does not give free reign to redistribute the name and branding of FreeCBT. So if you'd like to publish your own version, please rename it to avoid end-user confusion.