Mental Status Exam

Mental Status Exam

Mental Status Exam

• Main areas of assessment:
• Mood
• Affect
• Appearance
• Cognition
• Behaviour
• Speech
• Thought / Perception
• Judgment / Insight

General Appearance

• Appearance in relation to age
• Accessibility
• Friendly, cooperative, hostile, alert, confused, eye contact, rapport
• Body Build
• Thin, obese
• Clothing
• Cosmetics
• Hygiene/grooming/odor
• Facial expression and appropriateness
• Eye Contact

Psychomotor Behaviour

• Gait
• Handshake
• Abnormal Movements
• Grimaces, tics, twiches, foor tapping, hand wringing, mannerisms, posturing, nail biting etc
• Posture
• Rate of movements
• Co-ordination of movements

Mood and Affect

• Appropriateness of affect
• range of affect
• Stability of affect
• Attitude toward nurse during encounter
• Specific mood or feelings observed or reported
• Anxiety Level

Speech

• Rate of speech
• Flow of speech
• Intensity of volume
• Clarity
• Liveliness
• Quantity

Cognition

• Attention and concentration
• Memory (short term and long term)
• Abstraction
• Concrete thinking, ability to think abstractly
• Insight to illness
• Orientation
• Judgement

Thought Patterns

• Clarity
• Relevance/Logic
• Flow
• Excited, flight of ideas, tangentiality, poverty of thought, word salad, clang associations, slow, normal or rapid reactions to questions, doubting, indecision, loose association, blocking, perseveration, spontaneous, continuity of thought, etc.
• Content
• Rhymes, puns, suicidal ideation, unreality, delusion, illusion, hallucination, ideas of reference, compulsions, obsessions, phobias, preoccupations, ideas of reference, paranoid ideations, homicidal ideations, depersonalisation
• Level of consciousness