Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about mental state examination.

And you can find written notes on this topic at zero to finals.com slash mental state examination or in the

psychiatry section of the zero to finals more medicine book. And you can find questions to train your

knowledge on this content and help you remember the information for longer at members.0.0.com. So let's get straight into it.

A mental state examination is used to assess patients presenting with mental health symptoms and

disorders. It's equivalent to performing an abdominal examination in a patient with abdominal pain.

It offers a structure for assessing and documenting

the essential features of a mental health presentation. The examination involves observing,

assessing and commenting on eight steps. First, appearance and behavior, then speech, then mood and

affect, then thought, then perception, then cognition, then insight, and finally judgment.

And we're going to go through each one of these in more detail.

A risk assessment typically follows a mental state examination,

giving an estimate of the risk of self-harm, suicide and harm to others.

As we go through each one of these steps of the examination,

I'm discussing features that may be typical exam findings

in patients with depression, mania and schizophrenia. However, in reality, patients vary tremendously.

For example, depressed patients may appear and sound completely normal despite having a very low mood and suicidal ideations.

Let's start with appearance and behaviour.

Depressed patients may show signs of poor self-care, with poor hygiene and unwashed clothes.

There may be self-harm scars.

They may have weight loss or weight gain.

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