Visit prep view

The visit you have looked forward to all month is fifteen minutes long. Most of it gets eaten by "how have things been?" A diary in your head says "OK, I think." A diary on your phone says: this is what the last four weeks looked like.

What you bring

Open MoodSync. Hand over the calendar. Scroll back four weeks together — colored pills for each day, tap one for the full record (mood scales, sleep hours, meds toggle, notes).

If you have Pro, the Insights tab is the one-screen summary: 2-week trend, your best and hardest day, weekday-vs-weekend sleep, mood-with-meds vs without, and any prodrome warning. Each card cites the research behind it.

That is the prep. The chart is on your phone, the appointment is in front of you, and the conversation starts from a real month instead of a half-remembered one.

The clinician PDF report

Handing your phone across the desk works. Since version 2.0, there is a better option: a clinician PDF report — a document built for the person reading it, not screenshots of your phone.

What your psychiatrist actually sees:

• Stat cards — the headline numbers for the period at a glance
• Mood timeline — the whole stretch of days as one continuous chart
• Sleep pattern — hours per night across the period
• Medication impact — mood on logged-meds days next to the rest
• Mood by weekday — which days of the week run high or low for you
• Clinical scales panel — the 0–3 depression, elevation, irritability, and anxiety scales over time
• Daily log table — every entry, day by day, for the clinician who wants the detail

And if your clinician prefers raw data over a report, CSV export stays free for everyone — one file from Settings, every entry included.

Why this works

Daily smartphone self-monitoring in bipolar disorder was tested in a six-month randomized trial, which found it did not change symptoms2015 — the value is in bringing the record to your clinician. Ambulatory assessment collects entries in daily life in near real time, which aims to minimize the recall bias of retrospective reports2013. A tracker that takes seconds is easier to keep up, and the chart you scroll back through is what makes the visit specific.

What to read next

• The two-layer mood scale
• Sleep and medication, plotted with mood
• Calendar with forgiving streaks
• How MoodSync works for bipolar disorder