THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-AWARENESS

 It empowers you to make changes and build on your areas of strength and
identify areas where you would like to make improvements.
 It helps you create what you want and master your feelings, behavior and
actions.
 It is often a first step to goal setting.

WHAT PREVENTS YOU TO GROW IN LIFE?

Limits and Limitations
 Limits are physical impossibilities in a person.
 Limitations are usually psychological barriers, feelings of inadequacy,
unworthiness, believing one will fail-and they do fail.

WAYS TO DEVELOP YOURSELF

Be responsible for your actions
 Avoid negative people
 Read autobiography of successful people
 Attend seminars/ workshops
 Join and participate in school or community organization/s and activities
Balance your time between Personal and Academic
 Offer help to people
Psychiatric Assessment

 Referred to as psychosocial assessment in psychiatric mental health nursing

 Construct a picture of the client’s current emotional state, mental capacity and
behavioral function

Factors Influencing Assessment

 Client participation and feedback
 Client’s health status
 Client’s previous experiences/ misconceptions about health care
 Client’s ability to understand
 Nurse’s attitude and approach

How to conduct the interview

 ENVIRONMENT
 Comfortable, private, safe for client and nurse
 Fairly quiet with few distractions
 Isolated location
 INPUT FROM FAMILY AND FRIENDS
 The nurse must conduct at least part of the assessment without others
 Make effort to assess client in privacy in cases of suspected abuse
 HOW TO PHRASE QUESTIONS
 Use open-ended questions
 Use direct questions if client cannot organize thoughts
 Use nonjudgmental tone and language
Rapport
 how the interviewer and his patient relate
HOW TO ESTABLISH RAPPORT
 Put the patient and yourself at ease
Small talk
Recognize the signs: territorial (movement in the new territory), behavioral,
emotional (posture, facial expression, gestures, eye contact, tone of voice),
verbal (vocabulary and metaphors)
Respond to signs: verbal, gestures
 Find the suffering
Show compassion: facts, associated emotions
Respond with empathy: genuine, spontaneous, and accurate
 Assess insight
Become an ally
Set the therapeutic goal goals discussed with the patient therapeutic goals
 Show expertise
 Establish authority: ability to handle the patient
Authoritarian
Facilitative/supportive
 Balance roles
The empathic listenerpatient is at ease sensitive to the patient’s suffering
express compassion
MENTAL STATUS EXAMINATION

 Cornerstone in the evaluation of any patients with a medical, neurological, or

psychiatric disorder that affects thought, emotion, or behavior content, judgment,
mood, and affect
 Used to detect changes or abnormalities in a person’s intellectual functioning,
thought
 Represents a cross section of the patient’s psychological life and the sum total
of the nurses observations and impressions at the moment
 Involves observing the patient’s behavior and describing it in an
objective, nonjudgmental manner
 Basis for future comparison to facilitate tracking of the patient’s progress over
time
 IT IS AN EVALUATION OF THE PATIENT’S CURRENT STATE

Mental Status Assessment

Appearance – Describe what the client looks like and include physical characteristics,
manner of dress, level of hygiene and posture.
 Eye contact (eyes closed, good contact, avoids contact, stares)
 Dress (what individual is wearing, cleanliness, condition of clothes, neatness,
and appropriateness of garments)
 Grooming (malodorous, unkempt, dirty, and unshaven.
 Manner (cooperative, guarded, pleasant, suspicious, glib, angry, seductive,
ingratiating, evasive, friendly, hostile)
 Attentiveness to examiner (disinterested, bored, internally preoccupied,
distractible, attentive)
 Distinguishing features (scars, tattoos, bandages, bloodstains, missing teeth,
tobacco-stained fingers
 Prominent physical irregularity (missing limb, jaundice, profuse sweating,
goiter, wheezing, coughing)
 Emotional facial expression (crying, calm, perplexed, stressed, tense,
screaming, tremulous, furrowed brow)
 Alertness (alert, drowsy, stupor, confused)