The guide

How to draw a genogram

A genogram is built in a precise order. That is not method fussiness: starting at the wrong end forces you to redraw everything, and a diagram redrawn three times during a session interrupts the session. Here is the order that holds, and what it avoids.

This page describes a drawing method. What you gather, what you do with it and what you say about it belongs to your practice and your setting, not to a web page.

1. Place the index person

Start with the person the genogram is built around: the one consulting, or the one under discussion. They are called the index person, or identified patient. They are marked with a double outline, and are the only one on the diagram to carry it.

That choice is not neutral, and it comes first because it orients everything else: the diagram is read from there.

2. Their siblings, then their parents

Go sideways first — brothers and sisters, in birth order, oldest on the left — then up to the parents. That order rather than the reverse, because the sibship fixes the width you will need; placing the parents first means moving them as soon as the second child appears.

3. Go up to three generations

Three generations is the usual depth: the index person, their parents, their grandparents. Enough for a pattern to repeat and become visible, and few enough to fit on a page.

Beyond that, you generally lose in legibility what you gain in reach. A fourth generation is warranted when it carries something — a forebear whose story still circulates, children already born.

4. Date what can be dated

Births, deaths, marriages, separations. A date turns a list of people into a chronology, and it is the chronology that makes coincidences appear.

Never invent a date to fill a field. An uncertain date is qualified: ~1930 for « around », bef. and aft. to bracket it. An invented « 1 January 1930 » will later read as a fact.

5. Mark the households

A dashed frame surrounds those who live under the same roof. It is often the most telling piece on the diagram, and the one most often forgotten: kinship and household do not overlap. A grandmother taken in, shared custody, a stepparent change daily life without changing the family structure.

6. Relationship quality, last

Close, distant, conflictual, fused, cut off. Place these at the end, for two reasons.

They are the only interpretive information on the diagram. The rest is factual; these are a clinical judgement, and they change from session to session.
They overlay an already dense drawing. Placing them early means redrawing them with every person added.

The four mistakes that cost the most

Putting relationship quality on the union line

The union line already carries a notation: its dashes say cohabitation, its slashes say separation or divorce. Adding a relationship colour makes both illegible. Emotional quality is drawn beside, never on top.

Arranging the sibship out of order

Oldest on the left is a reading convention. A trained reader reads a sibling rank from it without counting; if it is wrong, they read a wrong rank.

Mistaking the diamond for a category

The diamond says « not recorded », not « other ». Use it for a forebear nobody knows anything about.

Putting patient data in a shared file

A genogram is a health document. It falls under the same obligations as the rest of the record, and a file dropped on some online service does not meet them.

By hand, or not

Paper is unbeatable during the session: it does not come between you. Its cost appears afterwards, when a person has to be added in the middle and everything shifts.

That is the problem SpatioPsy Genogram solves: the layout is automatic, and it recomputes on every addition. A position you pin by hand, on the other hand, is kept — the rest of the drawing rearranges itself around it.