MSE Flashcards
What is MSE?
Part of psych eval including a “snapshot” description of patient with examiners observations (objective) and complaints/symptoms of patients (subjective) components
Outline of MSE (10)
- Appearance/behavior
- Psychomotor abnormalities
- Speech
- Mood
- Affect
- Thought process
- Thought content
- Sensorium/intellectual fxn
- Insight
- Judgment
Define appearance/behavior
Objective description of patient as observed (able to identify pt w/o seeing them)
Components of appearance/behavior
- Physcial chars (sex, wt, physical health)
- Apparent vs chronological age
- Physical stigmata (Downs, FAS, tattoos)
- Dress
- Grooming
- Posture
- Facial expression
- Eye contact
- Receptiveness to interview (cooperative, attentive, seductive, hostile, guarded)
Define psychomotor activity
Amount and type of movement (retardation or agitation)
Bradykinesia
Slowness of activity, decrease in spontaneous movement
Akasthisia
Subjective feeling of muscular tension –> restlessness (often caused by 1st gen antipsychotics)
Catalepsy
Waxy flexibility, immobile position that is constantly maintained
Stereotypies
Repetitive, fixed pattern of physical action/speech (e.g. hand flapping, waving, body rocking, head banging); often associated w/ intellectual disability and/or autism
Cataplexy
Temporary loss of muscle tone precipitated by emotion (symptom of narcolepsy)
Tardive dyskinesia
Abnormal, involuntary, irregular choreoathetoid movements of head, limbs, or trunk – perioral most common (darting, twisting, protrustion of tongue; chewing/lateral jaw movements; lip puckering; facial grimacing)
Speech components
Quantity, quality, rate
Pressured speech
Rapid speech increased in amount and difficult to interpret
Wernicke’s aphasia
Receptive – speech is fluent but comprehension is impaired; normal effort; empty content of words and full of substitutions/neologisms (nonsense)
Broca’s aphasia
Expressive – speech is nonfluent; comprehension intact; effortful/frustrating; speech sparse/absent
Define mood
Pervasive/sustained emotion experienced by pt over time (subjectively reported)
Define affect
Outward expression of mood – objectively observed
Components of affect
Variability, intensity, appropriateness to mood
Labile affect
Rapid and abrupt changes in emotional tone, unrelated to external stimuli