MSE Flashcards
What is perplexity of affect?
-Bewildered, puzzled
Often co-occurs with serious thinking abnormality
Consider organic / psychotic
What is a fatuous affect?
Vacant, silly, superficial.
Often incongruent with thought / situation. Think - psychotic.
What is range?
Diversity of affective responses the patient can mount
When is range of affect commonly reduced?
Organic, psychotic and affective disorders
What is blunting?
Loss of sensitivity to emotional import of event; loss of empathy for an emotional event.
Common in psychotic states e.g. schizophrenia.
How does blunting differ from flattening?
-Little awareness of emotionality of an event cf flattening where there is awareness of emotionality but little capacity for emotional response
Slow thought stream in which disorders?
Depression, organic states
Pressured thought stream when?
Manic states
What is thought form?
Connectivity of ideas.
Concerned with logicality / understandability of connection between one thought and another
What are examples of disorders of thought form with abnormal connections between thoughts?
- Tangentiality
- Derailment
- Blocking
- Word salad
What are the features of a delusion?
- Fixed unshakeable beliefs held with absolute conviction
- Great personal significance
- Regarded as false by others
- out of keeping with psychosocial background
- Emerge in a pathological manner
- Extend to contaminate other beliefs (often)
- Evoke persistent idiosyncratic behaviour of potentially damaging nature
How does perception differ from sensation?
Sensation = simple experience of the world as received through impulses from sensory organs. Perception = more complete incorporating sensation and intellectual "knowing". Includes ourselves in relation to the object, assimilates meaning.
What is hallucination?
Perception without an object
What is insight?
Description of patient illness beliefs. Do they:
- think they are ill?
- know how they are ill?
- know how they became ill?
- think they should treat illness?
