Track Your Family Health History

It can be very helpful for your physicians and mental health professionals to know your family history of both physical and mental illnesses. I've found a tool that makes it easy to do just that. Your history will track by default your parents, grandparents, and sisters/brothers; you can also add aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. Six common illnesses are automatically tracked, and you can add any other conditions necessary - depression, bipolar disorder, obesity, alcoholism, just to name a few. (I added high blood pressure and high cholesterol to my tracking because more than half of my immediate family has those.) Then you can print out reports to take to your doctors or therapists. Since you fill in the "additional diseases" boxes, you could even add separate lines for bipolar disorder and suspected bipolar disorder. It will ask you for a date of diagnosis, but you can just select "age unknown."

This very useful tool is found at My Family Health Portrait and is a tool from the US Surgeon General through the Department of Health and Human Services. (However, you certainly don't have to be a US citizen to use it!)
~Marcia