The Week in Four Lines

Between-session tracking often fails because it asks for numbers that return as tables from which little is learned. This original tracker asks the patient for four marks a day, for sleep, mood, contact with others and the thing being avoided, joined into lines over seven days for four weeks. When the lines are drawn together, what becomes visible is less that mood dropped than what it dropped after. Two follow-up pages ask where the lines move together and where they move apart, and a page of clinician notes addresses adherence and what it reveals. The tracker has no scores, norms or cut-offs and must not be presented to patients as a test. Both complete and abandoned trackers are treated as clinically informative.