Introduction To Mental Status Exam Paper

Introduction To Mental Status Exam Paper

a. What is the relevance of Mental Status Exam?

b. What is the recommendation for how clinicians are to use the Mental Status Exam?

The relevance of Mental Status Exam

A mental status exam is a structured process that allows a clinician to observe and assess the current mental state of a patient under the domains of thought process, behavior, attitude, affect and mood, appearance, thought content, cognition, and perception. According to Fosbre (2022), the mental status exam in psychiatry is equivalent to the physical exam in general medicine. The mental status exam is valuable in distinguishing between a wide range of systemic conditions and also psychiatric and neurological disorders ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to dementia and delirium. In general, the mental status exam helps in the collection and organization of objective data. The clinician observes the patient’s appearance, nonverbal communication, physical behavior, mod and affects, speech patterns judgment, insight, perceptions, and cognitive ability Introduction To Mental Status Exam Paper.

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The recommendation for how clinicians are to use the Mental Status Exam

Clinicians are recommended to use the mental status exam to perform psychiatric and neurological evaluations.  Segal(2019) posits that t the mental status exam is utilized to assist a clinician form a working hypothesis bout the psychiatric diagnosis of a client.  Focused questions along with observations about the patient’s behavior and functioning can reveal either pathological or unremarkable findings. A standardized approach permits the clinician to assess multiple domains along with patterns across domains so as to best conceptualize the patient. There should be reporting and description of any indications of abnormality. Although it might be important for clinicians to consider individual observations in isolation, the clinician should remember that the mental status exam is just one component of a comprehensive exam ad is most consequential in the context of a comprehensive evaluation. The information obtained from the mental status exam should be combined with a medical evaluation, a review of psychiatric symptoms, and a psychosocial history to inform the most appropriate diagnosis, which then leads to the formulation of a treatment plan (Segal, 2019. Introduction To Mental Status Exam Paper

References

Fosbre, C. D. (2022). Varcarolis Essentials of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing -E-Book: A Communication Approach to Evidence-Based Care. Elsevier.

Segal, D. L. (2019). Diagnostic Interviewing. Springer Introduction To Mental Status Exam Paper