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Mental status examination, or MSE, is a medical process where a clinician working in the field of mental health (usually a social worker, psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse or psychologist) systematically examines a patient's mind. Each area of function is considered separately under categories in a way similar to a physical examination performed by physicians. However, much of the material for the MSE is gathered during psychiatric history taking. The result of this examination is combined with the psychiatric history to produce a "psychiatric formulation" of the person being examined. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
A social worker is a person employed in the administration of charity, social service, welfare, and poverty agencies, advocacy, or religious outreach programs. ...
Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that studies and treats mental and emotional disorders (see mental illness). ...
A Psychiatric Nurse is trained to care for individuals with mental health difficulties. ...
A psychologist is a scientist who studies psychology, the systematic investigation of the human behaviour and mental processes. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards and appeal to a wider international audience, this article may require cleanup. ...
In medicine, the physical examination or clinical examination is the process by which the physician investigates the body of a patient for signs of disease. ...
Physician examining a child A physician is a person who practices medicine. ...
A psychiatric history is the result of a medical process where a clinician working in the field of mental health (usually a psychiatrist) systematically records the content of an interview with a patient. ...
Neurologist, emergency physicians, and other physicians perform mental status examinations from different perspectives. In general, the neurological exam seeks evidence of localizable brain anomaly; the emergency physician may wish to quickly discover the effects of head trauma or intoxication (poisoning). Neurology is the branch of medicine that deals with the nervous system and disorders affecting it. ...
Emergency medicine is a branch of medicine that is practiced in a hospital emergency department, in the field (in a modified form; see EMS), and other locations where initial medical treatment of illness takes place. ...
The word physician should not be confused with physicist, which means a scientist in the area of physics. ...
Main categories
These vary around the world but there is broad commonality. Some schemes look at ego psychology and defence mechanisms while others are less broad. In his theory of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud sought to explain how the unconscious mind operates by proposing that it has a particular structure. ...
In psychoanalytic theory, a defence mechanism is an unconscious way to protect ones personality from unpleasant thoughts which may otherwise cause anxiety. ...
Appearance This category covers the physical aspects of the person. This includes his/her physical appearance such as age, height and weight, how he/she is dressed and groomed, and the dominant attitude presented in the interview. Some include factors like the degree of poise or comfort in the interview, and the degree of anxiety and how it is expressed in this category
Behaviour This looks at the way the person moves and the positions in which he/she holds his/her body. Abnormal movements such as tics or chorea as well the degree of movement is noted. A tic is a repeated, impulsive action, almost reflexive in nature, which the actor feels powerless to control or avoid. ...
Chorea may refer to: Chorea, an ancient Greek round dance accompanied by singing. ...
Speech It is customary to separate speech from thought in the MSE, although this is rather artificial. In general, aspects of the speech that will not be part of the section on thought are covered here. This includes the volume, rate and flow of speech itself as distinct from thought. Mannerisms, accent, stress or lack of it, hesitations, and stuttering are all covered here. Descriptions might use words like: garrulous, monotonous, laboured, loud, or emotional. One might be looking for the academic discipline of communications. ...
Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. ...
Stuttering (known as stammering in parts of the UK and scientifically known as dysphemia) is a speech disorder in which the normal flow of speech is frequently disrupted by repetitions (sounds, syllables, words or phrases), pauses and prolongations that differ both in frequency and severity from those of normally fluent...
Mood and affect Affect is the outward show of emotions and mood is the general pervasive emotional state. A person's affect may vary through depression, elation, anger and normality but if the overall sense from examination is of depression then that is used to describe the mood. The range of the affect describes whether the person shows a full or even expanded range or if his/her affect is blunted or restricted. Cultural considerations are important in this and many other aspects of the MSE. Appropriateness of the affect is also important. Is the emotion shown consistent with the topic being discussed? A patient with an inappropriate affect may cry talking about a parking ticket and show little or no emotion when discussing the recent death of a loved one. In everyday English usage and when used as a verb, affect concerns the influence of something on another person or object. ...
Emotion in its most general definition is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, originating automatic reaction behavior which has been adapted through evolution as a survival need. ...
Mood may refer to: chese Grammatical mood Emotional mood This is a disambiguation page, a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ...
The neutrality of this article is disputed. ...
Anger is a term for the emotional aspect of aggression, as a basic aspect of the stress response in animals in which a perceived aggravating stimulus provokes a counterresponse which is likewise aggravating and threatening of violence. ...
Perceptions This covers the area of the senses and describes any distortions such as illusions, delusions or hallucinations. The nature of the experience is described in detail. Auditory hallucinations are common in schizophrenia while visual disturbances are more common in organic problems. Depersonalization, where the person feels unreal, and derealization, where the person feels his/her surroundings are unreal, are also described here. PSYCHOLOGY In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ...
An illusion is a distortion of a sensory perception. ...
A hallucination is a sensory perception experienced in the absence of an external stimulus, as distinct from an illusion, which is a misperception of an external stimulus. ...
In psychiatry, depersonalization (or derealization) is the experience of feelings of loss of a sense of reality. ...
In psychiatry, depersonalization (or derealization) is the experience of feelings of loss of a sense of reality. ...
Thought This is divided into form, the way a person thinks, and content, what he/she thinks.
Form This looks at features like the rate of thoughts and how they flow and are connected. Formal thought disorder comprises processes such as pressure of thought (excessively rapid), disconnected thoughts, and circumstantial thoughts (over inclusive and slow to get to the point). In psychiatry, thought disorder or formal thought disorder is a term used to describe a symptom of psychotic mental illness. ...
Content Thought content includes those things discussed in the interview and the beliefs a person has. He/She may have thoughts that preoccupy him/her such as compulsions, ruminations, phobias or concerns about physical symptoms. He/She may have overvalued ideas or delusions. For other things named OCD, see OCD (disambiguation). ...
Rumination may mean a calm lengthy intent consideration, but can have several meanings, which need to be adressed separately Cud chewing of Cows and other Ruminants Negative cyclic thinking, persistent and recurrent worrying or brooding; see Clinical depression, Obsessive-compulsive disorder Rumination (eating disorder) This is a disambiguation page — a...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The term symptom (from the Greek syn = con/plus and pipto = fall, together meaning co-exist) has two similar meanings in the context of physical and mental health: A symptom may loosely be said to be a physical condition which shows that one has a particular illness or disorder (see...
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. ...
Cognition This looks at a number of areas such as the level of abstract thought (which declines or is absent in a number of conditions such as dementia and schizophrenia), the level of general education and intelligence, and the degree of concentration which is often tested by digit span recall or an ability to serially subtract seven starting at 100. An abstraction is an idea, conceptualization, or word for the collection of qualities that identify the referent of a word used to describe concrete objects or phenomena. ...
For other senses of this word, see dementia (disambiguation). ...
Intelligence is usually said to involve mental capabilities such as the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ...
Consciousness The level of conscious state is assessed whether it is steady or fluctuating, clouded or clear.
Orientation This frequently looks at whether the person knows the time (including the date), place (where he/she are), person (who he/she is), and situation (that he/she is in).
Memory Memory is tested by looking for immediate recall, short-term memory (an ability to remember several things after five minutes) and long-term memory (an ability to remember distant events such as the years of World War II). Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. ...
Short--term memory, sometimes referred to as primary or active memory, is that part of memory which stores a limited amount of information for a limited amount of time (roughly 15-30 seconds). ...
// Overview Long-term memory (LTM) is memory that can last as little as 30 seconds or as long as decades. ...
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Judgement This looks at how the person makes judgements about events. Is it logical or idiosyncratic? Is it reasoned?
Insight This describes how much understanding or awareness the person has of his/her own psychological functioning or disturbance.
Controversy The article so far has described how a clinician usually goes about the task of performing a MSE. There is controversy both within the profession about this and also controversy from without.
Within the profession There are many gaps in the traditional MSE that have been pointed out. The areas of impulse control, ego psychology and defence mechanisms are among them. Cultural concerns and knowledge of the facts can skew the assessment. A clinician who does not know that the person he/she is examining is who he/she claims to be may interpret information given as a delusion. The examination is inherently flawed because it relies on the clinician's inferences about what he/she observes. Any individual's observations and inferences, including those of the clinician, are based upon one's cultural background, education, expectations, belief system, etc. One attempt to reduce the impact of these inherent distortions is to use so-called "objective" testing of personality such as the MMPI or "projective" techinques such as the Rorschach inkblot test. These methods, however, have their own issues with reliability, validity, cultural influences, and possible conscious or unconscious distortion. Integration and/or comparison of clinical observations, such those in an MSE, with objective and projective test data may provide the clinician with an improved basis for clinical inferences about a patient. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most frequently used test in the mental health fields. ...
A solid tone rendering of the first of ten cards in the Rorschach inkblot test. ...
Outside the profession The MSE is one of the more subjective parts of the work of psychiatrists and psychologists. It thus attracts significant criticism from antipsychiatry and related groups. Beginning in the 1960s, a movement called anti-psychiatry claimed that psychiatric patients are not ill but are individuals that do not share the same consensus reality as most people in society. ...
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