Mental state examination speech

The diagnosis of mania is made on the basis of clinical history plus a mental state examination. Key features of mania include elevated, expansive or irritable mood accompanied by hyperactivity, pressure of speech, flight of ideas, grandiosity, hyposomnia and distractibility. Such episodes may alternate with severe depression, hence the term "bipolar illness", which is clinically similar to that seen in patients with "unipolar depression". In such cases, the mood can range from sadness to profound melancholia with feelings of guilt, anxiety, apprehension and suicidal ideation accompanied by anhedonia (lack of interest in work, food, sex, etc.). 

Assessment methods that determine mental functioning (attention, orientation, memory, speech, understanding of speech, psychomotor functions) in a simple, practical way are recommended for a rough estimation of the severity of dementia. The best-known instrument is the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE. Folstein et al.. 1975), which allows the grading of dementia on a 30-point scale on the basis of a simple 5 10-min examination. Other, rather more involved procedures include the Dementia Rating Scale (DRS) of Mattis (1976) and the Alzheimer Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS) of Rosen et al. (1984). The... 

A 14-year-old boy with major depressive disorder responded to paroxetine 20 mg/day with full remission of depressive symptoms except insomnia (16). Diphenhydramine and trazodone did not improve his sleep and caused excessive daytime drowsiness. He then responded well to zaleplon 10 mg, but when he took two extra tablets 3 weeks later he developed complex behavior and sleepwalking. He had slurred speech, was slow in responding to questions, was moderately confused, and was uncoordinated and moved slowly. Physical examination, routine laboratory investigations, and an electrocardiogram were all normal. He remained in hospital for 8 hours and awakened without any memory of his activities. His mental state at 1 week and 1 month were both normal. 

A clinical study of hospitalized drug-treated patients found many suffering from mental deterioration typical of a chronic organic brain syndrome that the researchers labeled dysmentia (Wilson et ah, 1983). Tardive dysmentia consists of unstable mood, loud speech, and [inappropriately close] approach to the examiner. It is probably a variant of hypomanic dementia.1 The mental abnormalities in the study by Wilson et al. (1983) correlated positively with TD symptoms measured on the Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale. In addition, length of neuroleptic treatment correlated with three measures of dementia unstable mood, loud speech, and euphoria. The authors stated, It is our hypothesis that certain of the behavioral changes observed in schizophrenic patients over time represent a behavioral equivalent of tardive dyskinesia, which we will call tardive dysmentia (p. 188). The tendency in the literature, perhaps in search of a euphemism, has been to use the term tardive dysmentia even when a full-blown dementing syndrome is described. 

I wish to describe an exceptional case that may throw some light on the pathogenesis of endemic cretinism. Only in one instance have I seen a clinical picture similar to endemic cretinism in the United States, in a young man I examined when he was 21 years old. He had moderately severe mental deficiency, moderate hearing loss and quite limited dysarthric speech, and the motor deficits typical of endemic cretinism (proximal hypertonia and mild flexion contractures, rigidity, exaggerated adductor and knee Jerks, absence of distal spasticity, disinhibited facial emotional expressions and strabismus.) In every... 

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