Walking into a fifteen-minute appointment prepared
One page: what has changed since last time, what you are taking, what you want to ask, and what you want by the next visit.
For the Psych Visit Brief. 10 minutes. Private on this device; nothing is sent anywhere. Not clinical advice.
Who it is for
Your appointments are short and you leave having forgotten the thing you came to say. The brief is a page you fill the night before and hand over, or read from, so the fifteen minutes go to decisions rather than reconstruction.
The short version
- Since last visit (step 2): specifics beat impressions. "Slept about five hours most nights for three weeks" is usable; "sleep has been bad" is not. Tick sleep, mood, adherence, side effects, events.
- Medications (step 3): everything, including the supplement and the thing you stopped taking without saying so. Stopping is data.
- Questions (step 4): no more than three. Put the one you are nervous about first, because you will run out of time, not nerve.
- By next visit (step 5): one outcome. A dose decision, a referral, a sleep target. Something the two of you can check.
- Export and bring two copies. Give one away.
A worked example
An invented reader, so the mechanics are visible. Your answers will differ.
Your real question is whether the afternoon flatness is the medication or the depression, and you have avoided asking because the answer might be a change. On the brief it goes first: "afternoon flatness since the dose change in March; is that the drug?" Below it, the sleep numbers that let the clinician answer. The visit ends with a dose plan and a date, which is step 5.
The one thing
Keep the old briefs. Six of them in a row are the history nobody else has.
Evidence: lithium and psychedelics, the seizure signal.