Mental Status Exam
Slides in this set (8)
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- Main areas of assessment:
- Mood
- Affect
- Appearance
- Cognition
- Behaviour
- Speech
- Thought / Perception
- Judgment / Insight
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- 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
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- Gait
- Handshake
- Abnormal Movements
- Grimaces, tics, twiches, foor tapping, hand wringing, mannerisms, posturing, nail biting etc
- Posture
- Rate of movements
- Co-ordination of movements
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- Appropriateness of affect
- range of affect
- Stability of affect
- Attitude toward nurse during encounter
- Specific mood or feelings observed or reported
- Anxiety Level
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- Rate of speech
- Flow of speech
- Intensity of volume
- Clarity
- Liveliness
- Quantity
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- Attention and concentration
- Memory (short term and long term)
- Abstraction
- Concrete thinking, ability to think abstractly
- Insight to illness
- Orientation
- Judgement
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- 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