Mental State Examination Flashcards
What are the components of the MSE?
Appearance and Behaviour Speech Mood and Affect (including suicidality) Thoughts (form and content) Perception Cognition Insight
What at the components of appearance in the MSE?
Age Physique Dress/Evidence of self neglect Effort with appearance Tattoos Signs of physical ill health Posture Facial expression Physical features of alcoholism or drug abuse
What are the components of behaviour in the MSE?
Describe what the patient is doing and the appropriateness for the situation
Psychomotor agitation/retardation
Eye contact
Attitude/rapport
What are the speech components in the MSE?
Form of speech Pressure or poverty of speech Spontaneous speech Latency Rate Volume Tone Articulation Sudden silences Accent Vocabulary Abnormalities of articulation – stammer, dysarthria
What are the mood components in the MSE?
Objective and subjective description of mood
Neutral, euthymic, dysphoric, euphoric, anxious, angry, apathetic, irritable
Rating of mood on a scale
What are the affect components in the MSE?
Congruent/ incongruent
Intensity – normal, blunted, exaggerated, flat, heightened
Extent to which affect changes – restricted, labile, reactive
What are the suicidality components in the MSE?
Important to ask Questions won't incur thoughts Suicidal ideation- active or passive Thoughts of life not worth living Self harm, methods, plans
What is psychosis?
Psychosis is a mental health problem that causes people to perceive or interpret things differently from those around them. This might involve hallucinations or delusions.
What are flights of ideas?
Words are associated together inappropriately because of their meaning or rhyme so that speech loses its aim and the patient wanders from the original theme.
What is formal thought disorder?
There is evidence from the patient’s speech or writing that there is an abnormality in the way their thoughts are linked together.
Disturbance in organisation, control and processing of thoughts.
Abnormality in form of speech rather than the content.
What are loosening of associations?
The patient’s speech is muddled, illogical, difficult to follow and cannot be clarified. The patient talks fairly freely but so vaguely that no information is given in spite of the number of words used.
What is Knights Move thinking?
There may be jumps from topic to topic with no connection between them.
What is tangential thinking?
Wandering from the topic and never returning to it or providing the information requested
What is circumstantiality?
An inability to answer a question without giving excessive, unnecessary detail. This differs from tangential thinking, in that the person does eventually return to the original point.
What are neologisms in the context of MSE?
An abnormality of speech in which the patient makes up a new word or phrase or uses existing words or phrases in bizarre ways which have no generally accepted meaning but which have idiosyncratic meaning to the patient.
