The Mental Status Assessment: Mental State Assessment

Mental State Examination Assessment instruments are a critical component in psychological testing. Clinicians use psychological assessments as a process of testing individuals to generate a hypothesis about their behavior, personality, or capabilities. There are four primary types of psychological assessments including, clinical interviews, assessment of intellectual functioning, personality assessment, and behavioral assessments. In addition, other types of psychological testing can include, achievement, aptitude, neuropsychological, occupational, and specific clinical test that can measure current levels of depression or anxiety. For example, the assessment instrument called the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), measures characteristic attitudes

The MSE was developed from the work of Karl Jaspers, designed to comprehend a client’s perception through the client’s description and observation (Tancredi, 1987). The examination includes objective observation of the clinician and subjective descriptions that are given by the client. The exam follows several domains including, appearance, behavior, mood and affect, speech, cognition, thoughts, perception, and insight and judgment (Tancredi, 1987). In the domain of appearance, useful cues can determine the client’s lifestyle, daily living skills, and quality of self-care. For example, their grooming, clothing, or hygiene can indicate whether they combed they hair brushed their teeth or are wearing the same clothes for multiple days. This can be a symptom of cognitive decline in the client. In the next domain, behavior is examined to assess the client’s verbal and nonverbal communication. This can include facial expressions, body language and gestures, eye contact, posture, psychomotor activity, and anxious behavior. All of which can reveal a lot about the client’s emotional state or attitude, which can also be a sign for cognitive

Affect means an immediate expression of emotion, which may resemble range, stability, and appropriateness in a client. For example, if a client is labile, he or she may not be able to control their sadness, which results to excessive crying. In addition, if the client has a flat or inappropriate affect, they may not show any emotions in response to a stimuli or they inappropriately respond to a negative or positive stimuli. In terms of mood, irritability and happiness are also factors to monitor when using the MSE. Mood is the prolonged emotional experience, so if a client comes in who is constantly irritable, this can be an indicator of a problem that should be addressed. In the next domain of the MSE, speech is explored. An assessment of speech would explore tone, volume, quantity, rate, and ease of conversation. For instance, a client with a rapid or pressured speech could represent a problem that should be addressed. The next domain, which is cognition, is the client’s capacity to process information. This portion of the MSE is the MMSE main focus of assessment. It focuses on level of consciousness, orientation to reality, general knowledge, language, memory functioning, literacy and arithmetic skills, attention and concentration, ability to deal with abstract concepts, and visual processing. Another domain of the MSE is the thought process, which explores a clients thinking. The areas explored are delusions,