Captive Thought Interactive

How are you feeling right now?

Your thoughts are not in control of you.
You are in control of them.

Think of a cluttered garage

A garage full of junk cannot do the one thing it was built for. You cannot park a car in it. Everything in there had a reason once, and now none of it can be reached.

So you drag it all out onto the driveway. In the daylight you can finally see which of it is trash and which of it matters. Then you put back only what belongs.

A mind fills up the same way. This is the driveway.

Two minutes. Then you are done.

This is not a course and it is not therapy. It is a daily habit, the size of brushing your teeth.

AHA asks how you are feeling. You pick your words from forty. He asks what it is about, and keeps asking — every question built out of what you just said, so he follows you instead of reading down a list. You talk or you type.

Then it is over, and it counts the day. Tomorrow he asks again.

Why a mind gets slow

Like a computer with RAM memory, a mind is slow and unresponsive when it is cluttered. The defragmentation of a computer removes the clutter and orders the information correctly. Ryan Harrison, 2014

Confusion comes from a word meaning mingled together. Everything running at once, nothing separated out, and no way to tell the size of any one thing. Pulling them apart is the whole trick. Fission is what makes an atom bomb; the same is true of a mind.

Get out of the pit

Captive Thought Interactive started in 2014, built on 2 Corinthians 10:5 — taking every thought captive. There was a board, a thought prison, and the story of Joseph, who was thrown in a pit, then a cell, and read the dreams of the two men locked in there with him. One walked out. One did not.

Some thoughts are worth releasing and promoting. They will build you something. Others mean you harm and belong nowhere near you.

This app is the capture. Getting them out where they can be looked at, which is the part nobody can do for you.

What it will not do

It will not keep anythingWhat you say never leaves the phone and is not stored — not on a server, not on the device. Close it and it is gone. That is the first question a prison or a VA program asks, and that is the answer.

It will not score youNobody is rated, ranked or diagnosed for what they say. Naming the thing exactly is the work. Grading it would only make somebody careful about what they name.

It will not read from a listA script asks everybody the same six questions. This one asks about the words you used, which is how a person gets from “tired” to the thing sitting underneath tired.

It will not make you typePlenty of people never will. Tap the circle and talk, and AHA answers out loud.

The one number that matters

Once a month AHA asks the PHQ-9 and the GAD-7 — the standard depression and anxiety questionnaires, word for word, both public domain. No licence, no fee, and every reviewer already knows them by name.

DepressionPHQ-9Nine questions, scored 0–27

AnxietyGAD-7Seven questions, scored 0–21

Real change5 pointsThe published threshold on PHQ-9. Anything smaller is reported as a number and nothing more.

Scores stay on the device with everything else. A pilot exports every answer as a spreadsheet when it has to report.

If somebody is in trouble

It stops, and it puts a person on the screen.

If somebody says they would be better off dead — typed into the app, or on the monthly questions — everything stops and 988 goes in front of them. That is not what this is for and it is not what it claims to do. It is what you owe somebody who says it out loud.

Open it