More threads by David Baxter PhD

David Baxter PhD

Late Founder
Mood diary for manic depression

Learning more about manic depression or bipolar disorder will help you and your family manage your illness more successfully. Knowing how to identify early warning signs, including unusually high energy levels, sleeplessness or recurring depression, will help you considerably. Understanding how aspects of daily life, such as sleep patterns and stressful situations can affect your mood will enable you to manage your condition.

The mood diary can help you and your doctor monitor your illness. By gathering information about your mood, events in your life, sleep patterns and medications you are taking, you may notice patterns that would otherwise remain undetected. Taking your mood diary to your doctor will help him or her monitor your illness and treatment. If you find it difficult to complete the diary, a relative, partner or close friend may be able to help.

A blank mood diary, completed example mood diary and guide can be downloaded below. You will need a PDF reader, such as the free Acrobat Reader to open the files. Multiple copies of the diary can be downloaded or you can always come back to download more copies.

Tips for completing a mood chart
What is this mood diary for?
Understanding the pattern of your mood symptoms is critical to successful treatment. During a visit with your_doctor, trying to remember your symptoms over the past few weeks or months can be difficult, especially if you are ill. By recording your mood daily, you will have much more reliable information to help your doctor decide what treatment is best for your condition.

The mood charts in this diary are intended to provide you with a simple way of monitoring your illness. Mood charting will allow you to bring together important pieces of information such as your mood state, medication levels, and stressful events. Recording this information on your chart generates a simple graph on which you can see emerging patterns that otherwise might be difficult to identify.

Mood charting is a good way to record events chronologically and will help you to report your mood to your doctor more efficiently. After a few months the mood chart can be a useful tool for looking to the future. Once you begin to track your mood and become accustomed to the chart, you will find it very quick and easy to enter information each day.
 

Miette

Member
I started doing this and find it quite useful. I find it much easier to report to my doctor my mood states between visits.
 
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