DBT diary card · in development
A daily DBT diary card built for the phone in your pocket rather than the folder in your bag. It works on a plane, it takes a minute, and it turns into something your therapist can read before the session starts.
What it is
Mood trackers ask how you feel and keep it. A diary card is a clinical instrument: the rows are chosen with your therapist, they change as treatment changes, and the point of filling it in is the conversation it produces on the other end.
Everything saves on the device the moment you type it and syncs when there's a connection. A card you can't fill in on the subway is a card you stop filling in.
Big targets, one screen, no scrolling through a grid on a phone. Rate the strongest point of the day, tick the anchors, add a line if something happened.
The same card, the same rows, as a printable sheet. Some people keep it on paper and some weeks everyone does.
For the session
Not "how has your mood been" — was the card kept. That is the thing the card itself cannot tell you, and it is the first thing a clinician looks for. Then the targets, the emotions, and the patient's own words, dated and verbatim.
Example — not real data
Four weeks, one square a day. Solid is a complete card.
When a week is missing, the report says whether the data is missing or the sync is — because those look identical on a chart, and only one of them is about the patient.
Who it's for
You already know the card is the part of DBT that quietly decides whether the rest works. You also know what it's like to reconstruct a week on the drive to an appointment.
You spend the first ten minutes of a session reading a card that was filled in this morning for the whole week, or not at all.
Rate the strongest point of the day, not the average. Printed across the top of every card
That instruction is where the name came from. An average flattens a day until it says nothing; the strongest point is a thing you can actually remember, and a thing worth talking about.
Where this is
It isn't finished and it isn't for sale. It exists because I keep this card every day for my own DBT program, my therapist saw what it had become, and said the apps she'd tried weren't good enough to recommend.
If you're a clinician who'd want to look at it, or someone who keeps a card and is tired of the ones out there, say so and I'll tell you when there's something to try.