Keeping a chart of daily mood symptoms, treatments, sleep patterns, and life events can help the doctor track and treat the illness most effectively. Sometimes this is called a daily life chart. Sarah Freeman refers to a useful mood chart on her website, however this is just too ‘’busy’’ for me and I got stressed trying to complete it!
http://www.bipolar-lives.com/bipolar-mood-chart.html
I tried my own much more simplified one page form where I made references
Anxiety
Food
Exercise
Headaches
Sleep
Other
However I just can’t seem to focus my brain in that way of communication. Plus noting down a score between 0-5 and at what time something happened etc. is too overwhelming and tedious for me. But if you like charts then this is a good way to follow the patterns of bi-polar, the possible triggers of a low/high episode, and the impact of diet, exercise and medication.
Because I am not remotely numerate or scientifically inclined my diary can only take the form of the written word or rather a deluge of self. After about five years of therapeutic supervision I have finally stopped bombarding my ever so understanding psychiatrist with lengthy emails. I am sure they are all stored and filed somewhere on my computer but there is nothing more I can write that will change the fact that I have a chronic mood disorder. Yes, it is important to be in touch and it helped me enormously at the beginning because I was so frightened of every feeling I was having. Now, whilst it is still petrifying to be in relapse I am able to just about rationalise that I will come through it.
Download the book for random excerpts of my mood diary… It refers to drugs that I was maybe trying at the time (I have tried most of the mood stabilising pills on the market usually with horrific consequences and have settled on a Lambipol/Seroquel/Dekapine combination which seems to have given me some longer term stability and perhaps the least of all the other evils).