wk 2

2

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The psychiatric interview is a key component in assessing a patient’s mental health, involving three critical elements: In the initial assessment, components such as the history and physical examination also referred to as the HEADS assessment, mental status examination (MSE), and psychosocial assessment.

1. History-Taking: This is crucial when trying to work out the nature of the problem since it will give the clinician an insight into the patient’s history. Patient history constitutes family psychiatric history, medical and personal history of the patient, and history of present illness. It is a critical tool in making diagnostics, risk factor determination, and treatment management.

2. Mental Status Examination (MSE): The MSE assesses the patient’s behavioral and cognitive condition. Functions involve things like sustained personal presentations, actions, feelings, perceptions, and levels of awareness. Sometimes it is very important to know the intensity of signs of certain mental diseases or disorders, which the MSE can contribute to.

3. Psychosocial Assessment: This looks at the patient’s interpersonal context, and how they manage their social interactions. As with employment, education, and family characteristics, knowledge of the patient’s social setting is essential to focus on effective intervention-related approaches necessary to address potential social causes of the patient’s condition (Davis & Murray, 2020).

In particular, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was given for this discussion. BDI is a standard and well-validated depression scale that assesses the severity of depression-related symptoms, Inter-observer, test-retest reliability, and Construct, Content, and Criterion validity are some of the psychometric properties associated with BDI. Because of its design, it is suitable for use in adults and adolescent clients with symptoms of depression and allows the clinician to determine the severity of the symptoms and the level of functioning that has been impaired by them (García-Batista et al., 2018).

When conducting the psychiatric interview, the BDI can be used to gauge how depressed the patient is. It is important for initial complaints, assessment of change in their severity and to monitor the effectiveness of the treatment. Being a quantitative tool, it helps deliver homogeneous and measurable data, the deficiency of which negatively impacts the nurse practitioner’s clinical decision-making capacity and the measurement of the plan’s progression over time (Wang & Gorenstein, 2013).

References

Davis, J. L., & Murray, J. F. (2020). HISTORY AND PHYSICAL EXAMINATION. January. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7152492/

García-Batista, Z. E., Guerra-Peña, K., Cano-Vindel, A., Herrera-Martínez, S. X., & Medrano, L. A. (2018). Validity and reliability of the beck depression inventory (BDI-II) in general and hospital population of Dominican Republic. PLoS ONE, 13(6), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199750

Wang, Y. P., & Gorenstein, C. (2013). Assessment of depression in medical patients: A systematic review of the utility of the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Clinics, 68(9), 1274–1287. https://doi.org/10.6061/clinics/2013(09)15