The Mental Status Examination
According to Keltner (2007), the MSE has a number of categories which help organizes the information gained during a patient assessment including:
General Appearance: Type, condition and appropriateness of clothing (for age, season, setting), grooming, cleanliness, physical condition and posture
Behaviors during the interview: Degree of cooperation, resistance, or evasiveness
Social skills: Friendliness, shyness, or withdrawal
Amount and type of motor activity: Psychomotor agitation or retardation, restlessness, tics, tremors, hypervigilance, or lack of activity.
Speech patterns: Amount, rate, volume, tone, pressure, mutism, slurring, or stuttering.
Degree of concentration and attention span
Orientation: To time place, person, and level of consciousness
Memory: Immediate recall, recent, remote, amnesia, and confabulation
Intellectual functioning: Educational level, use of language and knowledge, abstract versus concrete thinking (proverbs), and calculation (serial events)
Affect: Labile: blunted, flat, incongruent, inappropriate effect.
Mood: Specific moods expressed or observed- euphoria, depression, anxiety, anger, guilt, or fear.
Thought clarity: Coherence, confusion, or vagueness
Thought content: Helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, suicidal thoughts, or homicidal thoughts or plans, suspiciousness, phobias, obsessions, compulsions, preoccupation, denial, hallucinations (auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, tactile) or delusions ( influence, persecution, grandeur, religious, nihilistic, somatic)
Thought processes reflected in speech: Ambivalence, circumstantiality, flight of ideas, neologism, word salad)
Insight: Degree of awareness of illness, behaviors, problems, and their causes
Judgment: Soundness of problem, solving and decisions
Motivation: Degree of motivation of treatment
Give specific examples of each term to demonstrate your understanding. (i.e. what...