FreeCBT

Evan Rosson

About this app

FreeCBT is an open source thought diary for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).


Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the "gold standard" of psychotherapy and is widely considered to be one of the most effective, evidence backed treatments for depression, anxiety, and panic. If you go into just about any therapist or psychiatrist, CBT will likely be one of the first treatments they try.


FreeCBT is a companion and self-help app for one of the most common formats of CBT. You may have heard it called "the three column technique" or "catch it, check it, change it." Your brain is really good at making you feel exactly what you're thinking. Often, we find ourselves thinking "automatic negative thoughts" that lead us to fume on something that may not be true. That can cause us to feel depressed or anxious.


CBT helps you record "automatic thoughts," challenge them with cognitive distortions and then train your brain with an alternative thought. If you do it enough, you can change your thoughts, your moods and your behavior.


FreeCBT, a fork of Quirk, is open source under the GPL. You can find the code on Github at: https://github.com/erosson/freecbt

Ratings and reviews

Simple to use and cute design. Has been really helpful for guiding me to think about the lies I tell myself and challenging them. Not overly complicated so easy to use even when I'm not thinking straight. And I can process it by writing it down and I can then show it to my husband, which also helps him understand my thought process better. Plus no ads! Highly recommend to anyone dealing with thought distortions.

I thought this was too simple to work. Like I really didn't believe in it and it would be like yelling to the clouds and not at all satisfying because it's just an app, but wow does this help me when I'm going down a thought spiral like nothing else has! Amazing! It helps my overactive brain work with me instead of against me and it really does alleviate a lot of overwhelming emotions when they arise. I highly recommend to anyone!

I like this app. and I realize it's a tiny 1 person job, but I wish it had a few more things. I would like to see "fallacy of change, fallacy of fairness, always being right, and selective abstraction" added to the list of cognitive distortions. I would like a night mode feature. And I would like for the entry pages to reset when the current entry has been saved instead of closing and reopening the app. to add a new entry. But great experience overall.

What's new

This release adds two new translations contributed by FreeCBT users.

- Added European Portuguese translation. Thank you, miguelmf!
- Added Farsi translation. Thank you, ali73!

The settings screen now displays the completeness of each existing translation.