SAS 6

• Consciousness Rationale:6 of 6 Lesson Wrap-Up (10 minutes) involves marking the session as finished in a tracker.
• AL Strategy: Turn and talk involves students turning to talk partners to find out, summarize, clarify, share ideas, point of view or opinions.
• The tracker is used to track how much work has been accomplished and how much work remains.
• The mental status examination (MSE) is a tool for assessing psychological dysfunction and identifying mental health issues.
• The MSE examines a patient's LOC, general appearance, behavior, speech, mood and affect, intellectual performance, judgment, insight, perception, and thought content.
• During the MSE, the appearance of the patient is documented, including their sex, age, race, and ethnic background.
• The patient's nutritional status is documented by observing their current body weight and appearance.
• The exact time and date of the interview is recorded, as the mental status can vary over time, such as in delirium.
• The patient's posture and motor activity are noted during the MSE.
• The patient's dress and grooming are documented during the MSE.
• The patient's eye contact is noted during the MSE.
• The patient's facial expressions and attitude toward the examiner are recorded during the MSE.
• The mood of the patient is defined as a sustained emotion that the patient is experiencing.
• Symptoms and behaviors for mental health screening are determined during the MSE.
• An accurate mental status history for a patient is obtained during the MSE.
• A mini-mental status examination is performed as part of the MSE.
• Throughout the interview, very specific questions will be asked regarding the patient's history.
• Record the patient's spontaneous speed in relation to open-ended questions.
• The process of thoughts can be described with the following terms: looseness of association (irrelevance), flight of ideas (change topics), racing (rapid thoughts), tangential (departure from topic with no return), circumstantial (being vague, ie, "beating around the bush," giving inordinately long responses that only eventually answer the stated question), word salad (nonsensical responses, ie, jabberwocky), derailment (extreme irrelevance), neologism (creating new words), clanging (rhyming words), punning (talking in riddles), thought blocking (speech is halted), and poverty (limited conten
• To determine if a patient is having delusions, ask some of the following questions: Do you believe things that are not true? Do you have beliefs that are unusual or bizarre? Do you have beliefs that are contrary to the beliefs of your culture?
• Document information on all aspects of the patient's speech, including quality, quantity, rate, and volume of speech during the interview.
• Document whether the patient deviates from the subject at hand and has to be guided back to the topic more than once, or if they are redirectable in the event that they should wander off-topic.
• During the interview, note whether patients raise their voice when responding, whether the replies to questions are one-word answers or elaborative, and how fast or slow they are speaking.
• Record the patient's thought process information.
• Types of hallucinations include auditory (hearing things), visual (seeing things), gustatory (tasting things), tactile (feeling sensations), and olfactory (smelling things).
• Paying attention to patients' responses to determine how to rate their speech is important.
• Importantly, always ask about command-type hallucinations and inquire what the patient will do in response to these commanding hallucinations.
• To determine if a patient is experiencing hallucinations, ask some of the following questions: Do you hear voices when no one else is around? Do these voices seem to come from outside of your head, so that you turn to look and see who is talking? Can you see things that no one else can see? Do you have other unexplained sensations such as smells, sounds, or feelings?
• The patient's affect is noted to be inappropriate when there is no clear connection between what the patient is saying and the emotion being expressed.
• A patient's affect is determined by the observations made by the interviewer during the course of the interview.
• A patient whose mood could be defined as expansive may be so cheerful and full of laughter that it is difficult to refrain from smiling while conducting the interview.
• Screening and health promotion and counseling tools for depression, suicide, and dementia are identified during the MSE.
• Establishing accurate information pertaining to the length of a particular mood, if the mood has been reactive or not, and if the mood has been stable or unstable is helpful during the MSE.
• Judgment is estimated based on the history or on an imaginary scenario, for example, "What would you do if you smelled smoke in a crowded theater?"
• If a patient’s academic abilities are prohibitive or impeding, a clinician may ask for them to recite the months of the year backwards instead of "serial 7s."
• Orientation represents recent memory.
• Abstract thought is assessed by determining the patient's ability to determine similarities, for example, by asking how 2 items are alike.
• Insight is assessed by asking patients if they need help or if they believe their feelings or conditions are normal.
• Visuospatial ability is evaluated by having the patient draw interlocking pentagons.
• The situation is the reason why a patient is here.