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The software

What the genogram software does

This page describes what SpatioPsy Genogram does, in detail, and what it does not do. It is written from the software's own release notes rather than from a brochure: every line below corresponds to something you can do on screen today.

You draw during the session, not after it

A genogram drawn afterwards is no longer the same instrument: what is said while you trace it — the hesitation over a date, the person who is forgotten, the one added at the last moment — is part of the clinical material. The software is built to fit inside that time.

Select a person and the add buttons appear around them. A parent, a partner, a child, a sibling: one click each, without leaving the canvas and without a dialog to fill in before you can see the result. The detail panel — dates, occupation, notes, events — opens beside it when you need it, and not before.

The layout is automatic, and your edits stick

This is the sharpest difference from a drawing program or a repurposed spreadsheet. You name the people and the ties; the diagram arranges itself. A layout engine written for this one purpose aligns the generations, places the unions, orders siblings from eldest to youngest, and recomputes the whole thing on every addition — without ever overlapping two lines, and without making people dance around the screen at each change.

And what you move by hand stays put. Move someone, pin their position: the rest of the drawing reorganises around them, and no later addition will take that place back. A position you gave someone is a clinical decision, not a suggestion the machine may overrule. Ctrl+Z undoes everything, deletions included, so you can explore a hypothesis about a family configuration and then step back.

The clinical notation, in full

The grammar used is the reference codification (McGoldrick, Gerson and Petry, Genograms: Assessment and Treatment, 4th edition, 2020). What the software draws:

A distinction few programs make. On a couple line or a filiation, the shape of the line already carries a notation — a dashed line means cohabitation, another means adoption. An emotional quality therefore cannot be added there without contradicting it. The software warns you when the quality you choose will not be distinguishable on that kind of tie, and offers, with one button, to carry it on an emotional link between the two people, where all fourteen qualities are drawn distinctly. Nothing you entered is lost: it is the drawing that cannot carry it, not the record that forgets it.

Life events, placed on the diagram

A move, a hospital stay, a court case, a break-up: events are placed on people and carry a lettered marker by type. A checkable summary gathers them and can be exported to be passed on or filed with the record.

Layers: fold away to read again

On a large family, the core disappears under the branches. A layer folds an entire branch away long enough to read the centre again, then reopens it. Folding filters the display — it moves no one and changes nothing you entered.

The Analysis view

A side panel surfaces what the diagram contains without showing it: repetitions from one generation to the next, transgenerational patterns, family chronology. These are computed on the fly from what you entered: they are never stored, exported or transmitted. The panel also names the ties whose chosen quality cannot be read on the drawing, so you know where your entry does not show.

Anonymisation, for supervision

Two levels of anonymisation let you show a record in supervision, peer review or training. The mode removes names, and also notes and timeline entries — including those carried by a tie and not only by a person: that text is not drawn, but it travels with the document. The exported file name is part of what is anonymised.

The document that comes out

Vector printing and image export, crisp at any size, with a legend that explains only what is actually on the sheet — a symbol absent from the diagram does not appear in its legend. That is what makes the document readable by a colleague who was not there: for the file, for a letter, or for supervision.

Getting started

A user guide opens from the home screen and from an open record alike. Each section has its played example: the software marks the button to click and explains beside it, but you make the gesture — and always on the example record, never on a patient's. That example record holds 32 people across four generations, where every symbol and every kind of tie appears at least once.

What the software does not do

This list is as useful as the previous one, and we would rather you read it before installing than after.

And your records, through all of this

They stay on your computer. The vault encrypts every record at rest with AES-256, the key derived from your password, with automatic locking after inactivity and a recovery code given once. The software asks you to type it back twice a year, so that you discover its loss while that loss is still repairable. The software's only network request is the update check, and it goes out on your click.

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