Do you type or take notes during psychiatry appointments while you talk with patients?

Taking handwritten notes during an interview, therapy session, or assessment creates a fundamentally visceral connection. Phenomenologically, putting pen to paper accentuates the gravity of examining another human mind. A screen creates a third entity in the room; a notebook remains quiet, unobtrusi...

In the current era of psychiatric practice, the question of taking notes during appointments has two distinct dimensions. I have always taken written notes when seeing patients. As clinical time has become increasingly compressed, brief notes can help maintain accuracy when caring for many individua...

I never create notes or use a computer during a session as that interferes with the interaction in real time with a patient. However, if I'm doing EMDR or EFT or similar trauma work, I'll have a pad of paper to scribble a number down for level of emotional activation as it reduces with further inter...

I take notes immediately after seeing patients- they are handwritten, as I don't want to put psychiatric data on the computer. I use the SOAP format, which pretty much covers all the above:

S- subjective, what the patient tells me

O- objective, what I observe during the session

A- assessment: diagno...

I jot down short facts/keywords on a legal pad as placeholders to jog my memory when I later (usually at the end of the day) create a clinical note in the EHR... things about sleep, meds, events, clinical criteria that may help decision making, referrals the patient is following up on, anything rele...