Mental Status Examination Flashcards
Repeated purposeless behaviors often indicative of anxiety, such as drumming fingers, locks of hair, pacing, rocking, or tapping the foot.
Automatisms
Overall slowed movements.
Psychomotor Retardation
Maintenance of posture or position over time even when it is awkward.
Waxy Flexibility
Purposely imitates movements made by others.
Echopraxia
Extreme form of negativism; inability or refusal to speak even when the client is aware of the environment.
Mutism
“Beating around the bush”, giving unnecessary details that delays meeting a goal.
Circumstantiality
Repetition of a single word, idea, or phrase over and over.
Perseveration
Excessive amount of speech and rapid transition from one topic to another (composed of fragmented or unrelated ideas), without completing the original thought (common in manic).
Flight of ideas
Disorganized thinking that jumps from one idea to another with little or no evidence relation between the thoughts (vague to no connection).
Loose Associations
Sudden cessation of thoughts.
Blocking
Repeating exactly what is heard.
Echolalia
Inventing words only he understands.
Neologism
Sensory perception that have no external stimuli.
Hallucinations
Misperception or misinterpretations of an external stimuli.
Illusions
False belief that cannot be corrected by logic. Includes delusion of persecution, grandeur, reference, control or influence, somatic delusion, and nihilistic delusion
Delusions
Belief that thoughts or behavior have control over specific situations or people.
Magical Thinking
Extreme suspiciousness of others and of their actions or perceived intentions.
Paranoia
Excessive demonstration or of obsession with religious ideas or behavior.
Religiosity
Irrational fear of a specific object or situation.
Phobias
Maladaptive persistent patterns or thoughts, images, or feelings that generate anxiety.
Obsessions
Maladaptive urges to act on impulse (ritualistic behaviors).
Compulsions
Recurrent thought or center of particular idea or thought with an intense emotional component.
Preoccupations
Delusional belief that others can hear or know what the client is thinking.
Thought Broadcasting
Stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence or train of thought; sometimes unable to continue the idea.
Thought Blocking
A delusional belief that others are putting ideas or thoughts into the client’s head; the ideas are not of the client.
Thought Insertion
Facial expressions which are incongruent with mood or situation; often silly regardless of circumstances.
Inappropriate (incongruent) affect
Showing little or slow-to-respond facial expression. Other terms are bland or flat affect.
Blunted affect
Displaying one type of expression, usually serious or somber.
Restricted affect
Unpredictable and rapidly changing mood (from depressed and crying to euphoria).
Labile mood
Lack of concern or disinterest; inability to generate a normal response to people, situations, or the environment.
Apathy
Removal from consciousness awareness of painful feelings, memories, thought, or aspects of identity.
Dissociation
Co-existence of opposite emotions toward the same object, person, or situation.
Ambivalence
Inability to express joy or feeling.
Anhedonia
Mood that involves unhappiness, restlessness, and malaise.
Dysphoria
Inability to use abstract thinking, and utilizing concrete thinking; literal translations/interpretations.
Intellectual Functioning
Subjective sense of feeling unreal, strange, unfamiliar or emotional numbness. This is the most extreme form of disorientation.
Depersonalization
