Abnormal Psychology: Typical Signs and Symptoms
Chapter III-Typical Signs And Symptoms Of Mental Disorder
Classification according to Mental State Examination
A. Consciousness: the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surrounding. Disturbances of consciousness are most often associated with brain pathology.
1. Clouding of consciousness- The person is not fully awake, alert and oriented. Occurs in delirium, dementia, and cognitive disorder
The person is drowsy and does not react completely to stimuli.
There is disturbance of attention, concentration, memory, orientation and thinking.
2. Delirium -Acute reversible mental disorder characterized by confusion and some impairment of consciousness;
Generally associated with hallucination or fear.
3. Disorientation -Confusion; impairment of awareness of time, place and person (the position of the self in relation to other persons).
4. Stupor- State of decreased reactivity to stimuli; indicates a condition of partial coma or semicoma. Patient who is mute and immobile (akinetic mutism) but fully conscious, seen in psychotic depression, catatonic states.
B. Attention: the amount of effort exerted in focusing on certain portions of an experience; ability to sustain a focus on one activity; ability to concentrate.
1. Distractibility- Inability to focus one’s attention; the patient does not respond to the task at hand but attends to irrelevant phenomena in the environment.
2. Selective inattention-Here the patient blocks out anxiety-provoking stimuli.
3. Hypervigilance-excessive attention and focus on all internal and external, usually secondary to delusional or paranoid states.
C. Emotion: complex feeling state with psychic, somatic and behavioral components. It includes affect and mood. Affect- observed expression of emotion, possibly inconsistent with patient’s description of emotion.
Mood- refers to pervasive and sustained feeling tone that is experienced internally and that, in
Classification according to Mental State Examination
A. Consciousness: the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surrounding. Disturbances of consciousness are most often associated with brain pathology.
1. Clouding of consciousness- The person is not fully awake, alert and oriented. Occurs in delirium, dementia, and cognitive disorder
The person is drowsy and does not react completely to stimuli.
There is disturbance of attention, concentration, memory, orientation and thinking.
2. Delirium -Acute reversible mental disorder characterized by confusion and some impairment of consciousness;
Generally associated with hallucination or fear.
3. Disorientation -Confusion; impairment of awareness of time, place and person (the position of the self in relation to other persons).
4. Stupor- State of decreased reactivity to stimuli; indicates a condition of partial coma or semicoma. Patient who is mute and immobile (akinetic mutism) but fully conscious, seen in psychotic depression, catatonic states.
B. Attention: the amount of effort exerted in focusing on certain portions of an experience; ability to sustain a focus on one activity; ability to concentrate.
1. Distractibility- Inability to focus one’s attention; the patient does not respond to the task at hand but attends to irrelevant phenomena in the environment.
2. Selective inattention-Here the patient blocks out anxiety-provoking stimuli.
3. Hypervigilance-excessive attention and focus on all internal and external, usually secondary to delusional or paranoid states.
C. Emotion: complex feeling state with psychic, somatic and behavioral components. It includes affect and mood. Affect- observed expression of emotion, possibly inconsistent with patient’s description of emotion.
Mood- refers to pervasive and sustained feeling tone that is experienced internally and that, in