Show HN: Helm - A Flutter app that gamifies stress/anxiety/depression management | Hacker News Reader

depression management

github.com

196 pointschipneverdies61 comments

We should be able to aid each other, in person, on learning how to manage these ailments, which are frequently associated to a lack of social fulfillment, as I've personally experienced on myself. Gamifying it is literally the last option I would recommend to anyone suffering from anxiety, stress or depression, as blindly following an app's dictates goes essentially against the hard, introspective, and highly critical work one needs to put in in order to start leaning towards being at peace with oneself.

I'm not even going to elaborate on how the "reward" function is plainly ill-conceived, for intance.

Please, talk to those you love about their suffering; talk to them about yours. Put yourself in the hands of a professional, if you need it. Stop looking for crutches.

When I was in high school, I had social anxiety and a tendency to isolate myself. I was also seeing a psychologist at the time. One summer, my mom and I decided (with professional blessing) that I would get a “point” for every activity I did with my friends. It worked, and was actually a big turning point for me personally. If nothing else, it became a way for us to talk about anxiety in a way that removed some of the pressure I was putting on myself and turned it into a game: I wasn’t failing as a person any more, I was just playing a game.

Please be careful about dismissing an idea so absolutely. Everyone is different. Sometimes crutches do help.

I have an anxiety disorder. Mine's co-morbid with ADHD, but even if it weren't ADHD-like symptoms are well-known secondaries of anxiety and depression. For people like me, gamification helps greatly with incentivizing participation until a habit is built. I have no idea if this particular app would be what'd do it for me, but you're down on the concept in general in a way that doesn't represent my own situation well.

I do hear what you're saying, and nothing replaces social interaction, but I think you're making an assumption about this being a be-all-end-all. Maybe it would be for some, but those are probably the people who wouldn't adequately find in-person on their own anyway. Maybe this gets them far enough to do so, since just being functional enough to get help in the first place is often one of the biggest problems.

On another note, everyone's different. It's one thing to say what works for you, but your social fulfillment will likely be higher if you don't tell everyone else what will and won't work for them.

Nothing wrong with crutches. If they don't work for you don't assume them useless to others. Ditto the "reward" function that @throwit-hey15 used so successfully.

It depends on the person and situation. Sometimes the game becomes the major source of stress, sometimes it's the right abstraction and motivation for improvement.

I believe the contribution of this app is great. Maybe it will help some people think about the meaning of being anxious or depressed. By using this app, they may realize they are not actually depressed, or maybe they will not feel better after using it, and they will look for help elsewhere.

Great idea imo.

As a person with anxiety and depression, its easy to come up with dep/anx fueled narratives about how this could go wrong:

1) The app might stress me out and make it worse

2) I might become obsessed with the app and not do stuff I should be doing

3) My employer might get the data somehow and fire me

4) A future employer might get the data and use it as a reason to not hire me

5) Google might get the data and add it my shadow profile, which will then be sold to advertisers. I won't even know and won't be able to delete it.

6) A health insurer will use this as a reason to deny me insurance or charge a premium.

Those are just off the type of my head. Don't want to think about what my brain would come up with at 3AM.

I'm not a fan of the "Buy something nice" one. It seems like it might feed a harmful coping mechanism.

I suffer from several of the conditions listed in the target group, and have done impulse purchases online when the lows get low.

Definitely a bad coping mechanism - not helpful for feeling better (tend to feel worse when the product arrives), and definitely a waste of money.

I think earning rewards, in general, is kind of an awkward thing in an app like this.

SEO clash with the popular artifact packager or k8s helm

There's also an open source digital synthesizer named Helm

This comment turns out to be a tangent. But has anyone looked at whether gamification increases stress/anxiety/depression among social app users?

for:

https://www.amazon.com/SuperBetter-Living-Gamefully-Jane-McG...

https://tim.blog/2015/07/28/jane-mcgonigal/

against:

https://mental.jmir.org/2019/6/e13717/

Your "against" seems to be an actual study, your "for" links are from Jane McGonigal who's been criticized for making claims not backed up in any way and who makes money selling "betterness" through apps, TED talks, and books.

Thanks for your productive contribution to the discussion

Nice idea, but I don't think gamification works in this context. https://mental.jmir.org/2019/6/e13717/

I'm a simple man -- I see an open source Flutter app, I upvote it.

Thanks for publishing this, I always appreciate seeing examples of full-fledged Flutter apps for reference! The app looks really well built and intuitive to use.

It is not technically open source, but 'source provided' until there is an OSS license provided.

True it may not technically be open source, but certain rights are granted because the author published on GitHub, according to the ToS:

> If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.

https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

That doesn't grant any meaningful rights at all.

Notably, it doesn't given any right to download or use the code.

I think it does allow download, although it is a little unclear; from the previous sentence:

> By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).

If I clone a Github repo to my local machine this is 'making my own copy in a repository I control'. But this clause doesn't grant any further right, e.g., to compile code in the repo. This isn't an unheard-of situation: e.g., Knuth allows distribution of the TeX source to the TeXbook but not compiling the source with a TeX engine.

It later clarifies with "through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking)."

That seems to deny any local rights.

Update: Unfortunately the code is entirely proprietary as per the hackathon submission guidelines: "The NUS Office of Student Affairs will entirely own the right of your solutions and will implement the solutions as they deem fit to benefit Hack For Good 2020's partner non-profit organizations."

As a result the github project is now archived.

I don’t know, gamifying stress/anxiety management sounds extremely stressful.

I can't wait to be ranked #1 most stressed in US servers

Thanks for contributing a nice piece of work particularly appropriate for tough times! I’ve been wanting to learn Dart and Flutter on a real-life but manageable project.

Real question:

Who can accurately assess and answer the question: "How anxious are you?"?

Just reading this question triggers a bit of anxiety, as I go into self-analysis mode to figure out what signs I've been exhibiting that may indicate that I am "anxious".

"Well, I have been a bit jittery, so...7? But I just finished a coffee, so maybe a 5?"

I would have a very difficult time answering this question accurately.

Oof, I thought Flutter was supposed to make programmatic UI more readable/easy?

    body: Stack(
          children: <Widget>[
            LayoutBuilder(
              builder: (ctx, constraints) => Container(
                width: double.infinity,
                height: constraints.maxHeight - 67.0,
                padding: const EdgeInsets.fromLTRB(20.0, 20.0, 20.0, 0.0),
                child: Column(
                  mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.min,
                  crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.start,
                  children: <Widget>[
                    Column(
                      mainAxisSize: MainAxis
                     ....

I built a few apps with it. It starts to feel more streamlined once you work in it for a couple days, but whenever I go to make an edit it takes me about an hour of saying "what in the..." before it starts to click.

What I always wish I had was a better way to create functions that build smaller units so I didn't have be so many tabs deep. It can be done, but it's not fun or straightforward.

You can hide that in a smaller widget called SomethingWidget(param:...) to make it more readable.

From my experience, using the above style with its data binding is nicer than hunting through XML or whatever GUI you use and seeing how that relates to your code.

Easier to navigate and debug. But I agree it can look overwhelming if it’s not split into smaller widgets.

Yikes, that’s quite something

To get points users should be doing the self-care tasks that fall by the wayside with depression. e.g. shower, brush teeth, laundry, cleaning your home/apt/room/car, grocery shopping, etc. Social interaction also. Things like watching online videos and playing mobile games isn't going to pull anyone out of that hole.

Why don't you provide builds?

Seconded, would love to send this to a friend to try out.

Just guessing here - I'd think a lot of stress/anxiety/depression problems are linked in some way to screen time and using an app to help with them is just lonely and more depressing.

How do you like flutter? What are your impressions of the platform.

Personally, I wasn't a big fan of having to disable the telemetry in the SDK itself - thankfully there was a single, small footnote about it in the docs. Not sure what I expected from the Goog honestly, but it was enough to put a bad taste in my mouth. But hey, M$ does it too with the dotnet core SDK, so maybe that's "par for the course" these days. YMMV.

Can you explain more? What does "having to disable the telemetry" mean and what's the effect of that?

Telemetry is when companies measure and collect your usage of their product, in theory so they can improve it, know which features are used and which not, where users spend most time, etc.

As it is a kind of vague definition and you (almost) never know exactly what information is being transmitted, and given the fact that it is Google (or Microsoft, or Apple, or whatever), people sometimes rather just disable telemetry at all.

I would suggest renaming 'anxiety credits' to something else, reminding people they have anxiety won't help getting rid of it.

This project name is so overused.

Helm - The package manager for Kurbenetes

https://helm.sh/

Helm - A functionally reactive game engine

https://github.com/z0w0/helm

Helm - Emacs incremental completion and selection narrowing framework

https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

Helm - A free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation

https://github.com/mtytel/helm

Don't forget:

Helm - Personal email/calendar/file/photo server

https://gethelm.com

(FWIW, I love mine)

Who's heard of those? Should a project have a monopoly on such a generic word from the dictionary?

Helm for Kubernetes is pretty huge ~17k stars on GitHub and nearing an industry standard.

That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if there was a line of blenders called Raspberry Pi, and a furniture line called Raspberry Pi, shoes branded as Raspberry Pi, a laptop model called Raspberry Pi (unrelated to Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi), etc. It's just confusing.

Raspberry Pi is a really unnatural combination of words. Helm is a pretty average noun.

That's exactly why it's a poor choice for a product name. It's "greedy" to claim generic words for your products. It works for the likes of FAANGs with stuff like "Google groups", but at least they're coupling it with their brand. To just come out and call your product "Sink" for example, with no qualifiers, is foolish and bordering on unethical.

This is a fine comment. But could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Among emacs users, the helm completion framework is also very popular.

Among FP enthusiasts, the helm FRP engine is pretty interesting, too.

So, at least the first 3 I mentioned are pretty well known in their respective communities.

The last one is from the last Show HN I saw for a Helm project.

Helm could be considered almost industry standard tooling for k8s users these days... At least in my circle, when the world helm is used it's as obvious what is mean as when 'apt' or 'yum' is mentioned...

I use two of those helms every day.

Complaints about names tend to provide little in the way of insightful feedback. Changing the name won’t move the project forward very much if at all. Mostly it’s a distraction. Based on evidence of multiple successful projects named ‘helm’ listed, there’s a good chance it’s a good enough name.

It's also part of a ship and the word has been in use for more than 8 centuries: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/helm

No. The correct answer is “shit on its name” and not to encourage people to share cool projects. You fool!

Ed. note: I also upvoted for the same reason

I think the (currently top) comment about it's name is actually important ... I also wondered why it was named "Helm" once I read the title as it didn't seem to fit what the application does. But you're right in the sense a more constructive activity would be to recommend other names. Wouldn't a name like "Relax" or "Exhale" be better in line with "what's in the package"? (note that these were the first two names that came to mind).

I personally would prefer something like Burrito or Ossobuco

I can see it now. The get-togethers where you ask your tech-illiterate friends and family, "have you heard of Burrito?" and they all look at you funny. As opposed to, "have you heard of Helm?", and only that one friend who worked on a boat for a summer gets excited that he can add something to conversation.

Language needs an upgrade

I'd be happy with cherry picking out all the marketing/semi-literate pop culture influences making a mess of it, but that's just as unlikely as any kind of upgrade.

Comments like that one are indeed a problem, but adding more comments about them makes the problem worse.

If you see something like that sitting at the top of an HN thread, you can flag it or let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617516.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com