The mental status exam begins before you even begin talking to the patient! Appearance and behaviours can give you a small sense of how the rest of your psychiatric interview will go. Descriptors of appearance include: Movement and Gait Look for any unusual movements: gait abnormalities, tics,...
Observations during the mental status exam should separate form (process) from the content of behavior. What a person is talking about, the subject matter, is content. How a person is talking, the fluency and accuracy of his speech, the grammatical correctness of his language is ___. 5. ...