Following Louis’ blog last Thursday, I thought I’d write something about my experience with Moodscope and how useful it has been with my diagnosis and treatment for bipolar disorder.

The first time I was referred to the mental health service, in 2004, with suspected bipolar disorder, my experience was less than positive. It seemed to be an exercise in ticking boxes with the “score” indicating bipolar or not. The part of the diagnosis process I found most difficult was tracking my periods of depression over the past thirty years. One’s memory becomes inevitably blurred. Was it 1985 or 1987 that I had that serious depression and nearly threw myself out of a sixth storey window? Was it 1999 or 2002 I was so depressed I couldn’t work for five weeks? I couldn’t remember and so couldn’t establish a pattern. I couldn’t remember the manias at all.

How different was the process in 2014, when I next went to my GP. This time, I had several years of Moodscope scores. I printed out my notes from the beginning, ever since I had started using Moodscope, and showed them to my GP. The pattern was obvious, as the graph clearly showed. Twice a year, I would have a month of high scores, followed by six weeks – exactly six weeks – of serious depression. In my manic phase, the scores would be around 85%, and in the depressive phase, the scores would dip down to 10% or lower. The rest of the time, I was “normal,” which meant I had a stable score of between 65% and 75%. Any anomalies in this pattern were easily accounted for by the annotations for the day. Perhaps I was ill, when the score would dip, or perhaps something especially nice had happened, when I might hit 79%. 

The GP and psychiatrist could see the pattern clearly. This was hard evidence, not merely anecdotal.

Both my GP and psychiatrist have found my Moodscope scores very useful, and both have said they would recommend it to their other patients.

I have found the Moodscope graph invaluable. I now have scores going back fourteen years. I cannot only see the pattern of mania and depression, but also the effect of medication. Most recently, I was prescribed Aripiprazole. This worked but turned me into a zombie. My consistently low scores - 56% or thereabouts - meant it was easy for my psychiatrist to see that the dose needed to be adjusted. Once we were in the “Goldilocks” zone, we could see that my mood was consistently stable at 73%. The medication has worked.

Moodscope provides empirical evidence of your mood over time. The longer and more consistently you do it, the more useful it is. Annotations point to triggering events and the scores measure how serious the depression or mania was or is. The pattern is accurate to the day.

Going to your GP or psychiatrist or therapist with this firm data is invaluable – not just to you, but to them as well. 

Mary

A Moodscope member