[Merlin]

A mood chart is intended to provide you with a simple means of generating a graphic representation of your illness over the last month. Mood charting will allow you to systemically bring together important pieces of information such as medication levels, mood state, and major life events to see emerging patterns that otherwise might be difficult to discern.

Mood charting is a good way to record events chronologically and will help you to report your mood and symptoms to your clinician 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 simple to enter information each day.

Two examples available are used by the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bipolar Clinic and Research Program (http://www.manicdepressive.org/images/moodchart.pdf) and the National Institute of Mental Health (http://www.cqaimh.org/pdf/tool_edu_moodchart.pdf).

For each day, you rate your mood. Mark the block that appropriately describes your mood at its best/highest,” and worst/lowest for that day. If you have had high/elevated and low/depressed moods record the severity of both.

List the number of hours you slept.

Weigh yourself once or twice a month and record.

List your medications including dose and record the number of tablets taken. Include PRN (as needed) medications.

Rate any anxiety or irritability that you may have on a scale from 0-3 and record daily.

For women, record days on which you had your period by circling the dates.

In addition, depending on the chart you choose to use, you may record if you drank alcohol and used drugs, or if you had therapy, or if you had psychotic symptoms. There is also the option of daily notes describing any significant events that happened.

There are also online mood charting options. One option is PsychCentral’s own: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/mood-tracker/. Another is https://www.moodtracker.com/.

You might also choose to create your own mood chart. This allows you to record symptoms or treatments of your choice such as isolating and exercise.