The mental status exam should include the general awareness and responsiveness of the patient. Additionally, one may also include the orientation, intelligence, memory, judgment, and thought process of the patient. At the same time, the patient's behavior and mood should undergo assessment.
It includes descriptions of the patient's appearance and general behavior, level of consciousness and attentiveness, motor and speech activity, mood and affect, thought and perception, attitude and insight, the reaction evoked in the examiner, and, finally, higher cognitive abilities.
In clinical practice, it is usually used to detect cognitive impairment in older patients. The MMSE includes 11 questions that test five areas of cognitive function: orientation, registration, attention and calculation, recall, and language.
It requires about 20 minutes to administer and assesses attention, executive functioning, language, memory, orientation, and visuospatial proficiency.
The following is a brief example of a mental status exam: Appearance: The client is slouched and disheveled. General behavior: The client is uncooperative and has poor eye contact. Speech: The client speaks fast and soft.
What are your mental illness symptoms? What are the thoughts, feelings or behaviours that have been troubling you? Has a particular event, such as the death of a loved one, brought on these symptoms? How often do you have the symptoms and what are you doing when you have them?
What are The four main components of the mental status assessment? And the Acronym to help remember? are appearance, behavior, cognition, and thought processes.
Disadvantages of the MMSE include difficulty to identify mild cognitive impairment and difficulty in recording changes in cases of severe dementia.
In his book “Developing Mental Training,” psychologist Peter Clough, describes four important traits of mental toughness, which he calls the four C's: confidence, challenge, control and commitment.
Statements about the patient's mood should include depth, intensity, duration, and fluctuations. Common adjectives used to describe mood include depressed, despairing, irritable, anxious, angry, expansive, euphoric, empty, guilty, hopeless, futile, self-contemptuous, frightened, and perplexed.
The 5Cs are competence, confidence, character, caring, and connection.
Appearance is described as well groomed/dishevelled, how they are dressed, demeanour in interview, level of eye contact. In males -shaving. As appropriate, physical behaviour such as restlessness, motor activity [retardation/overactivation] Level of co-operation, any evidence of aggression or hostility.
Your speech problems may be caused by other things, like psychosis or anxiety. That's called secondary alogia. For example, you may not talk because you hear voices that tell you not to speak. Or you might not talk because you feel nervous or paranoid around other people.
Common words used to describe a mood include the following: Anxious, panicky, terrified, sad, depressed, angry, enraged, euphoric, and guilty. Once should be as specific as possible in describing a mood, and vague terms such as “upset” or “agitated” should be avoided.
Mental status is assessed by the observations of the health care provider and the direct one-to-one interviews. A mental status assessment observes mood, behavior, orientation, judgment, memory, problem-solving ability, functioning society, and contact with reality.
A flat affect can be a negative symptom of schizophrenia, meaning that your emotional expressions don't show outwardly. You may speak in a dull, flat voice and your face may not change. You also may have trouble understanding emotions in other people.
4. There's No Pass or Fail. Just as there's no cookie-cutter approach to psychological testing, there aren't right or wrong answers to any test questions. This means you can't pass or fail a test, which eliminates the need to study.
Examples of descriptors for affect include sad, depressed, anxious, agitated, irritable, angry, elated, expansive, labile, inappropriate, incongruent with content of speech. It is important to describe the patient's thought processes as distinguished from the thought content.
Questions like this: “So what do you think you want to do?” • “Have I got it right?” • “Did I leave anything out?” • “Is there anything else you think I should know at this point?” • “Did I misunderstand anything?” • “So what else can you tell me about…?
Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental disorders and affect nearly 30% of adults at some point in their lives. But anxiety disorders are treatable and a number of effective treatments are available. Treatment helps most people lead normal productive lives.
For common problems such as depression and anxiety, your GP may be able to give you a diagnosis after one or two appointments. For less common problems you'll need to be referred to a mental health specialist (such as a psychiatrist), and they may want to see you over a longer period of time before making a diagnosis.