RE: Discussion – Week 2 response
Prepare a response to your colleagues post below and then compare your assessment tool to theirs.
colleagues post The three important components that I identified in the psychiatric interview are developing an effective relationship with the patient, mental status exam, and the past psychiatric history. I consider developing an effective relationship with the patient important because building a connection between you and the patient will help the patient feel comfortable and be honest and truthful. Starting off an initial interview by being open and friendly will make a difference in keeping that patient on with a good relationship. The mental status exam is important because it is conducted throughout the whole assessment process. The mental status exam is the interviewer’s evaluation of the current emotional and cognitive function by appearance, behavior, speech, affect, thought process, thought content, and cognitive exam (Carlat, 2017, p. 138). The mental status exam provides the interviewer assessments through observation and questions. Lastly, the past psychiatric history is important because it gives a better picture of the patient’s presentation. Getting past records of the patients psychiatric history can help the interviewer understand any pertinent information that is needed. Also, asking the patient past history can give an idea of the patient’s cognitive function.
Beck Anxiety Inventory is a self-report that measures anxiety. The Beck Anxiety Inventory is a chosen assessment by most because of its cost-effective, easy to administer, and efficient way to measure a patient’s anxiety. Studies show the reliability initially of this assessment are quite high and show high results after assessing in a week. The Cronbach’s alpha correlation and coefficient of the BAI is 0.940 which is a high correlation (Liang, Wang, & Zhu, 2018, p. 665). There is high internal consistency. There are 21 items of the assessment that can be answered as not at all, mildly-but it didn’t bother me much, moderately-it wasn’t pleasant at times, or severely-it bothered me a lot. The patient makes the decision on how much they have been bothered by each of these symptoms during the past month. These 21 items are all symptoms that you could feel with anxiety. A range of scores could be between 0-63, 0-21 meaning low anxiety, 22-35 meaning moderate anxiety, and 36 and above being concerning levels of anxiety. It can be used in outpatient psychiatric clinics, with patients that they believe have an anxiety disorder, and patients already diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Related to validity, correlations in the range of .47 to .81 have been obtained between the BAI scores and scores on the Cognition Checklist Anxiety subscale (De Ayala et al., 2005, p. 747).
The beck anxiety inventory is appropriate to use on patients that are 17 and older that for people on first appointments or have anxiety disorder. At my hospital, the PHQ9 is given out to all patients to check their depression, the beck anxiety inventory can be given out similarly. During an interview, the interviewer can administer it when a patient is stating anxiety and does not have a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or the interviewer would like to see if there has been any improvements. This scale can be helpful during the psychiatric assessment to help diagnosis an anxiety disorder. It is a diagnostic tool for interviewers to use for diagnosing a patient.
