Dr Simon Morley
Hi, I’m Dr Simon Morley. I’m a doctor, but not a psychiatrist, and I have bipolar disorder.
When I became unwell, I became really interested in mood monitoring. I began to see how powerful it could be in helping me understand my own condition. I wanted a simple way to record what was happening and see how my mood was changing over time.
So I built Moomoni. I built it for myself, but I built it for you, too.
Moomoni is for anyone who is having difficulties with their mood.
Perhaps you’ve been feeling low or sad. Perhaps you’ve experienced periods when your mood or energy becomes unusually elevated. Or perhaps your mood changes in ways that you find difficult to understand or explain.
You don’t need to have a diagnosis to use Moomoni.
You may simply feel that something isn’t quite right and want to understand what’s happening. By recording your mood over several weeks or months, you can build a picture of your experience and take it to your doctor.
It’s much easier to point to a chart and show someone what has been happening than to try to remember and explain weeks or months of changing symptoms.
Your doctor can look at that record with you. It may form a valuable part of the overall picture as they listen to your experiences, ask questions and consider whether you have a mood disorder or another condition.
Think of it like this. If you have persistent headaches, your doctor might arrange an MRI scan to help investigate what is happening.
But there is no MRI scan or blood test that can show how your mood has been behaving over the past few weeks or months.
What you can do is create a picture of it yourself.
By spending a minute or two recording your mood each day, you can gradually build a clear, graphic record of how you’ve been feeling. You can see when things changed, how long those changes lasted, and what was happening with your sleep, energy, thoughts and everyday life at the same time.
It isn’t the equivalent of a medical scan or blood test, but it can make something that is otherwise difficult to see much more visible.
And when you visit your doctor, instead of trying to remember how you felt three Tuesdays ago — or summarising six difficult weeks as “a bit up and down” — you can show them what you have recorded.
That can be enormously helpful to both of you.
I want to be very clear about this. Moomoni cannot tell you what is wrong with you. It does not diagnose bipolar disorder, depression or any other condition.
What it does is help you build a detailed record of your own experience. An experienced doctor can look at that record with you, alongside your symptoms, history and other clinical information, to help understand what has been happening.
Moomoni also does not monitor you on behalf of your doctor or send emergency alerts.
There is one catch: you cannot build a meaningful mood chart in a day or two.
It takes a little effort, every day, over several weeks. The longer you use Moomoni, the more useful the picture may become.
My suggestion is to make it part of your evening routine. Set a reminder and fill it in straight after brushing your teeth. Try to make it as automatic as brushing your teeth itself.
Within a few weeks, you will have something you simply could not have created from memory: a record of how your mood has actually been changing.
And as the months go by, that record may become even more valuable.
I want to make something else absolutely clear.
Moomoni is not a commercial venture. It exists to help people, not to make money.
There are no adverts, no paid extras and no premium features you need to buy. I have no intention of ever charging people to use Moomoni or making a profit from it.
I built this app because I wanted something that would help me understand my own mood, and I wanted other people to have that same opportunity.
That’s the point of Moomoni. Nothing more complicated than that.
I also have a bigger ambition.
Imagine if thousands of people with mood disorders recorded their experiences every day, over months and years. Together, those records could help researchers understand how mood disorders actually behave and change over time.
One day, I hope Moomoni will be able to contribute to a large, international research database that helps scientists investigate mood disorders and ultimately improve our understanding of them.
That research will never be about making a profit. It will be about helping people with mood disorders.
Taking part in research would always be your choice. You would be able to use Moomoni without contributing your data, and your personal diary would remain yours.
Any future research contribution would require your separate agreement and would use privacy-protected data without your name or other direct personal identifiers. The details of how this would work would be explained clearly before you decided whether to take part.
But that is a dream for the future. For now, my hope is much simpler.
I built Moomoni because I wanted to understand my own mood better.
I hope it helps you understand yours, too.
Simon
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