Comprehensive What is included in a mental status exam relevant to age? 1. Affect - current emotional state (full, labile, restricted, flat, inappropriate, suicidal/homicidal) 2. Appearance - overall impression, posture, clothes, grooming, health, apparent age, angry/afraid 3. Attention - concentration, attendance, digit recall 4. Attitude toward examiner - cooperative, hostile, defensive, seductive, evasive, ingratiating 5. Content of thought - preoccupations, obsessions, phobias, rituals, delusions, depersonalization 6. Form of thought - circumstantial, flight ideas, evasiveness, loosening associations, perseverance, blocking Do you ever see/hear/smell/taste/feel things that are not really there? 7. General Behavior - mannerisms, gestures, combative, rigid, twitching, psychomotor retardation 8. Insight - do they realize they are ill 9. Intellectual Functioning- fund of knowledge, calculations, abstraction (proverbs, similarities) 10. Judgment - errors in judgment. What is an error in judgment? A flawed decision 11. Memory - immediate (digit span), recent (three objects at 5 minutes), remote (days to years) 12. Mood - overall emotional state (sad, happy, depressed, elated, anxious, irritable) 13. Orientation - time, person, place, situation. What time, day, month, date, and year is it? Where are you now? What location, building, floor, and room are you in? What location, building, floor, and room were you in on June 1, 2018, and December 1, 2018? What were the issues? What are the issues? 14. Perceptions - misperceptions, illusions, hallucinations 15. Psychomotor Activity - increased, reduced, agitated, abnormal movements 16. Speech/Language - rate (increased, pressured, slow), tone (soft, angry), volume, articulation, language (aphasia). Appropriateness of conversation, rate of speech (more than 100 words per minute is normal, fewer than 50 words per minute is abnormal). Writing and reading appropriate to education level. 17. State of consciousness - alert, drowsy, very drowsy, obtundation, stupor, coma. Conscious means able to hear, see, and talk relevant to age.