Each year, millions of patients throughout the world survive a hospitalization that included a stay in an intensive care unit (ICU). ICU survivors can experience a variety of physical, cognitive, and emotional sequelae. In particular, mental health disorders associated with an ICU stay include anxiety, depression symptoms, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and complicated grief for families.

It is possible that impaired recall of the ICU stay, potentially accompanied by hallucinations or delusions, contributes to the post traumatic stress. Thus, use of an ICU diary given to the patient at discharge to consult at will could offer benefit. By providing objective information to patients, which could help fill in memory gaps, ICU diaries have allowed them to abandon unrealistic experiences, reconstruct their experience, gain a sense of reality, and resolve differences in experience with their families. However, studies exploring the usefulness of ICU diaries in preventing psychological post–intensive care syndrome were often conducted with small numbers of patients or select samples or with various design characteristics, outcome measures, and length of follow-up that compromised comparision.
This multicenter study was designed to assess the effect of an ICU diary on the occurrence of mental health consequences in patients and their families in the ICU setting.