Mental Health
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood. (www.mentalhealth.gov)
There are many strategies that can help you establish and keep good mental health. These can include:
- keeping a positive attitude
- staying physically active
- helping other people
- getting enough sleep
- eating a healthy diet
- asking for professional help with your mental health if you need it
- socializing with people whom you enjoy spending time with
- forming and using effective coping skills to deal with your problems. (www.healthline.com)
Mental Status Exam
The mental status examination is a structured assessment of the patient's behavioral and cognitive functioning. It includes descriptions of the patient's appearance and general behavior, level of consciousness and attentiveness, motor and speech activity, mood and affect, thought and perception, attitude and insight, the reaction evoked in the examiner, and, finally, higher cognitive abilities. The specific cognitive functions of alertness, language, memory, constructional ability, and abstract reasoning are the most clinically relevant. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
The mental status examination or mental state examination (MSE) is an important part of the clinical assessment process in neurological and psychiatric practice. It is a structured way of observing and describing a patient's psychological functioning at a given point in time, under the domains of appearance, attitude, behavior, mood, and affect, speech, thought process, thought content, perception, cognition, insight, and judgment. (en.wikipedia.org)
THE MENTAL STATUS EXAMINATION
https://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI_278/Other/Clerkship/Didactics/Readings/THE%20MENTAL%20STATUS%20EXAMINATION.pdf
