The Mental Status ExamTraining for interns and therapists
A structured training in observing, describing, and documenting a client’s mental status — and in the ethical obligations that attach the moment you begin. Work through the sections in order. Complete the activities rather than skimming them; they are where the learning is. When you finish, take the assessment linked at the bottom.
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What you will be able to do
- Define the mental status exam and distinguish it from diagnosis, history, and formulation.
- Name the twelve domains and sort a clinical observation into the correct one.
- Separate what you observed, what the client reported, and what you inferred, and write each so a reader can tell them apart.
- Use the standard descriptor vocabulary accurately, including the distinctions clinicians most often reverse.
- Write entries that describe rather than conclude, and that state plainly when a domain was not assessed.
- Identify the ACA (2014), NBCC (2023), and APA (2017) standards governing assessment, documentation, and disclosure.
- Recognize where culture, language, disability, medication, and circumstance can convert normal variation into a false finding.
What the MSE is, and what it is not
The mental status exam is a structured description of a client’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning at a single point in time (Trzepacz & Baker, 1993). It is gathered through observation and interview rather than through a test the client completes, and its value comes from being time-stamped, specific, and repeatable across sessions.
Polanski and Hinkle (2000) argued that professional counselors should treat the MSE as core clinical practice rather than as a borrowed medical procedure. Their point matters for how you use it: the MSE organizes observation in a way that supports counseling assessment without requiring you to pathologize the person in front of you.
It is a cross-section
Think of it as the psychological equivalent of vital signs. It describes this session. Taken serially across sessions, it becomes the clearest evidence you have that treatment is or is not working — and it is often where deterioration shows before the client names it.
It is not a diagnosis
The MSE contains no diagnostic labels, no history, no formulation. It is one assessment source. Both ACA (2014) Standard E.6.a and NBCC (2023) Directive 64 require clinical decisions to rest on multiple sources rather than a single criterion, and APA (2017) Standard 9.01 requires conclusions to rest on information sufficient to substantiate them.
The three kinds of statement
Every line in an MSE is one of these three. Mixing them is the most common error in trainee documentation, because it makes an inference look like a fact.
- Observed — you saw or heard it. Appearance, psychomotor activity, speech, affect. The most defensible content in your note, because another clinician in the room would have seen the same thing.
- Reported — the client told you. Mood, most thought content, most perceptual experience. Attribute it plainly: “client reports,” “client denies.”
- Inferred — you reasoned to it. Thought process, insight, judgment. Legitimate clinical work, but every inference needs observable evidence sitting beside it.
Read this entry and decide which parts are observed, which are reported, and which are inferred: “Client appeared fatigued, reported sleeping four hours nightly, and demonstrated poor insight into the role of her schedule.”
“Appeared fatigued” — presented as observed, but “fatigued” is already an inference from what you actually saw. Stronger: “dark circles under eyes; yawned repeatedly; slowed movement.”
“Reported sleeping four hours nightly” — correctly reported and correctly attributed. This one is fine.
“Demonstrated poor insight” — inferred, and undersupported. A reader cannot check your reasoning. Stronger: “Insight: limited — client identified fatigue as a problem but did not connect it to a schedule she described as unchangeable.”
The lesson. Two of the three statements dressed inference as observation. That is how a chart becomes an opinion no one can audit.
The twelve domains
Expand each domain. Note the evidence type, the descriptor vocabulary, and the sample chart line. Sources vary slightly in how they subdivide these; Orchard documents Attitude separately because the quality of the working contact is clinically informative and easily lost when folded into Behavior (Boland et al., 2021; Trzepacz & Baker, 1993).
01Appearance — observed
Apparent age relative to stated age, build, grooming, hygiene, dress, distinguishing features, assistive equipment. Take it in during the walk from the waiting room rather than studying the client during the interview.
02Behavior and psychomotor activity — observed
Motor activity, posture, gait, eye contact, mannerisms, tremor, abnormal movements. Psychomotor change is one of the few MSE findings that tracks reliably with mood episodes and with medication effects. Distinguish restlessness the client can stop from restlessness they cannot.
03Attitude toward the examiner — observed and inferred
How the client relates to you across the session. Notice shifts — cooperative at intake, guarded once a topic opens — and anchor every descriptor to a behavior you could name if asked. Treat guardedness as information about safety, not as resistance.
04Speech — observed
Form only: rate, rhythm, volume, prosody, latency, articulation. What the client says belongs in thought process or thought content. Pressured speech is defined by being difficult to interrupt, not by speed alone. For clients who sign or use AAC, document expressive communication in that modality.
05Mood — reported
The sustained internal emotional state as the client describes it. Subjective by definition. Ask openly, then record the client’s own words in quotation marks before translating into clinical terms. Add an anchor where useful — intensity out of ten, or duration since the last shift.
06Affect — observed and inferred
Observable emotional expression, rated on four axes: range, intensity, stability, and congruence with stated mood and content. Constricted means reduced range; blunted means markedly reduced; flat means essentially none. Labile means rapid, poorly controlled shifts — not crying during a hard topic.
07Thought process — inferred
How ideas are organized and connected — architecture, not furniture. Ask an open question and let the client run for a minute without steering. If you cannot follow, note that; difficulty following is itself the finding.
08Thought content — reported and inferred
Themes and preoccupations, plus the explicit risk screen. The highest-stakes domain and the one most often documented too thinly. Ask about suicidal and homicidal ideation directly and every session — a systematic review found no evidence that asking induces or increases ideation (Dazzi et al., 2014). Record what was asked and what was answered.
09Perception — reported and observed
Disturbances in sensory experience and in the sense of self or reality. Normalize before asking. Specify modality, frequency, content, and how distressing or commanding the experience is. Keep dissociative experience distinct from psychosis — they are different findings.
10Cognition — observed and tested
Alertness, orientation, attention and concentration, recent and remote memory, abstraction, fund of knowledge relative to education. Orientation ×4 — person, place, time, situation — is usually gathered conversationally. Screen formally only when history, age, injury, substance use, or a change in functioning warrants it, and only with an instrument you are qualified to administer (Folstein et al., 1975; Nasreddine et al., 2005).
11Insight — inferred
Awareness of one’s difficulties, of how they affect life, and of one’s own role in change. A spectrum, and it shifts — including within a single session. Distinguish intellectual insight (can explain it) from emotional insight (acts on it). Record the evidence alongside the rating.
12Judgment — reported and inferred
The capacity to appraise a situation, anticipate consequences, and act accordingly — assessed primarily from the client’s actual recent decisions, especially those involving safety. Hypothetical questions may supplement this but should not replace it; the classic stamped-envelope item predicts very little about real-world functioning (Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2017). Note judgment specifically where it matters: safety, medication, finances, driving, caregiving.
The distinctions clinicians reverse
Four pairs account for most vocabulary errors in trainee documentation. Learn them as pairs rather than as separate definitions — the contrast is what makes each one stick.
Mood vs. affect
Mood is reported and quoted. Affect is observed and rated. Mood is the climate; affect is today’s weather. Never merge them into one line — whether they match is itself a finding, and collapsing the two erases it.
Circumstantial vs. tangential
Circumstantial thinking takes the scenic route and arrives. Tangential thinking departs and never returns. That is the entire distinction, and it is the one most often reversed under exam pressure.
Illusion vs. hallucination
An illusion is a real external stimulus misperceived — a coat on a door read as a person. A hallucination has no external stimulus at all. A delusion is neither; it is a fixed false belief and belongs in thought content, not perception.
Insight vs. judgment
Insight is understanding — awareness of the problem and of one’s part in it. Judgment is doing — appraising a situation and acting. A client can have good insight and poor judgment, or the reverse. They are not a single scale.
A client says she feels “completely fine” while tears run down her face and her voice breaks. Write the Mood and Affect lines you would enter. Then decide: is anything else worth documenting here?
Mood: reported as “completely fine.”
Affect: tearful, voice tremulous; incongruent with stated mood.
The incongruence is the clinical information. If you had written “Mood/affect: tearful” as a single line, you would have documented the tears and lost the thing that matters — that her account of herself and her presentation do not match.
What else? Nothing else in the MSE. Resist the pull to add “client appears to be minimizing” — that is a formulation, and it belongs in your assessment section with the reasoning attached, not in a descriptive exam.
Documentation craft
These entries are a clinical record and a legal record at once. Wiger (2021) frames the standard usefully: write for the clinician who reads your note at two in the morning in an emergency department, knowing nothing about your client except what you wrote.
Four rules
- Describe, don’t conclude. “Speech rapid and pressured; affect expansive” — not “client seemed manic.” Let the reader see the data you saw and reach the conclusion with you.
- Anchor your quantifiers. “Somewhat anxious” tells a reader nothing. What did you see, how often, how intense, compared with when?
- Say when you didn’t assess. “Not assessed” and “grossly intact on interview” are both honest entries. Marking an untested domain normal is the error most likely to matter later.
- Never copy forward. Ask the risk question every session and record that day’s answer. Identical MSE text across sessions makes the whole record unreliable — including the sessions where you did the work (NBCC, 2023, Directive 36).
Rewrite this entry so that nothing in it is an interpretation: “Client was hostile and non-compliant, clearly did not want to be here, and has no insight into her drinking.”
Attitude: irritable; responded to several questions with brief answers and twice stated she had been “sent here.” Declined to discuss alcohol use.
Insight: limited regarding alcohol use — client described her drinking as “the same as everybody’s” and did not connect it to the incident that prompted referral.
What changed. “Hostile” became an observable behavior. “Non-compliant” — which records your frustration rather than her presentation — disappeared entirely. “Clearly did not want to be here” became her actual words. “No insight” became a rating with the evidence attached, and softened to “limited,” which is what the evidence actually supports.
Terms like non-compliant, manipulative, and attention-seeking follow a client through a record for years. Importing personal values into clinical work is addressed directly at ACA (2014) A.4.b and NBCC (2023) Directive 17.
The ethics of clinical assessment and documentation
The MSE is an assessment activity and a documentation activity simultaneously, which places it under two sets of obligations at once. The crosswalk below maps the practice questions you will actually face to the standards that answer them.
One provision deserves naming before the rest. APA (2017) Standard 9.07 prohibits promoting the use of assessment techniques by unqualified persons — except when the use is for training purposes with appropriate supervision. That exception is what authorizes your practice as a trainee. It is also what makes your supervision non-optional: the exception holds only as long as the supervision is real.
Am I qualified?
Observational MSE sits within counseling practice. Formal screeners are tests and require specific training and supervised experience.
Boundaries of competence; competence to use and interpret assessment instruments.
Provide only services qualified for; use or interpret only assessments for which qualified.
Use assessments appropriately; no use by unqualified persons except in supervised training.
Does the client know what I’m doing?
Clients are told the purpose, process, and limits of assessment before it happens — including a screener you decide on mid-session.
Informed consent; explanation to clients prior to assessment.
Inform clients of purposes and limitations; give complete information before testing.
Informed consent in assessments, with defined exceptions.
Is one exam enough to conclude anything?
No. A cross-section is placed alongside history, collateral, and course over time.
Proper diagnosis; appropriateness of instruments and multiple forms of assessment.
Consider psychometric limitations; decide on multiple sources, not one criterion.
Base opinions on information and techniques sufficient to substantiate findings.
Whose norms am I applying?
Descriptors carry cultural assumptions. Culture, language, disability, age, and circumstance all shape presentation and interpretation.
Cultural sensitivity; historical and social prejudices in diagnosis; multicultural issues in assessment.
Multicultural competence; normative-group limits; address access and disability.
Account for situational, personal, linguistic, and cultural differences that may reduce interpretive accuracy; state limitations.
What goes in the record?
Accurate, contemporaneous, updated as the picture changes, retained and secured per law.
Records and documentation; creating, maintaining, and securing records.
Retain and protect records; update when the picture changes; document how results are used.
Documentation of professional and scientific work and maintenance of records.
What if the exam surfaces risk?
Active ideation triggers assessment, safety planning, and disclosure limited to what is necessary.
Serious and foreseeable harm; primary responsibility to promote client welfare.
Confidentiality exception to prevent serious and foreseeable harm; seek supervision when unsure.
Disclosures without consent where permitted by law for a valid purpose, including protecting from harm.
Who sees the assessment data?
MSE content and screener scores are confidential clinical data with the same release rules as any record content.
Release of data to qualified professionals; transmission of confidential information.
Protect confidentiality and security of assessments and data; no release without consent.
Release of test data pursuant to client release; maintain test security.
Where does supervision come in?
Pre-licensed clinicians practice under a supervisor responsible for client welfare and for the documentation entering the record.
Client welfare in supervision; client rights regarding supervisee status; supervisee responsibilities.
Accurate supervision records; disclose trainee status; provide supervisor’s name, credentials, and contact.
The training exception that authorizes supervised trainee assessment practice.
You are a practicum student. Twenty minutes into an intake, you decide the client’s memory complaints warrant a formal cognitive screener. You have read about the instrument but never administered one. What are your obligations, and what should you actually do?
Do not administer it. Having read about an instrument is not competence. ACA (2014) E.2.a and NBCC (2023) Directive 60 require training and supervised experience; APA (2017) Standard 9.07 permits trainee use only under appropriate supervision, which means supervision arranged in advance, not discovered afterward.
Do document the observation. “Client reported difficulty recalling recent conversations; recent memory not formally assessed this session” is accurate, useful, and within your scope.
Do raise it in supervision the same week — sooner if the memory concern suggests a medical process. NBCC (2023) Directive 5 requires seeking supervision or consultation when you are unsure of your responsibilities.
And when you do administer one, the client must first be told the purpose, format, and limitations (ACA E.3.a; NBCC Directive 65; APA 9.03), and you must document how the result will be used (NBCC Directive 62).
The larger point. The pressure you felt in that moment — a real clinical question, a tool that seems to answer it, no supervisor in the room — is exactly the situation these standards were written for.
Culture, disability, medication, and circumstance
The MSE is a set of norms wearing a lab coat. Much of its descriptor vocabulary was standardized on a narrow population, and the difference between a finding and a misattribution is usually one follow-up question. APA (2017) Standard 9.06 requires accounting for situational, personal, linguistic, and cultural differences that may reduce the accuracy of interpretation, and stating the resulting limitations. The DSM-5-TR Cultural Formulation Interview offers a structured way to gather that context (American Psychiatric Association, 2022).
Culture and language
- Eye contact, physical distance, emotional expressiveness, and deference to authority vary widely and legitimately.
- Assess in the client’s preferred language where possible; document interpreter use, including who interpreted.
- Spiritual and religious experience sanctioned within a community is not, on its own, a perceptual disturbance.
- Second-language hesitation is a language phenomenon, not thought blocking.
- Racial disparities in psychotic-disorder diagnosis are well documented (Schwartz & Blankenship, 2014). ACA (2014) E.5.c makes recognizing that pattern an obligation, not an optional sensitivity.
Disability and neurodivergence
- Autistic communication — reduced eye contact, flat prosody, literal interpretation, stimming — routinely reads as blunted affect, guardedness, or concreteness, and contributes to missed and mistaken identification in adults (Lai & Baron-Cohen, 2015).
- For Deaf and hard-of-hearing clients, reframe the speech domain around expressive communication in the client’s modality.
- Motor and neurological conditions affect gait, tremor, expression, and speech independent of mental state.
- Ask what the client’s baseline is. Then document deviation from that baseline (NBCC, 2023, Directive 67).
Medication and medical state
- Sedation, akathisia, Parkinsonism, tremor, and dry mouth are medication effects that surface across four domains at once (Boland et al., 2021).
- Thyroid dysfunction, anemia, blood glucose instability, sleep deprivation, pain, and infection all move mood, affect, speech, and cognition.
- Substance use and withdrawal — including caffeine and nicotine — change the exam hour to hour.
- A new cognitive or speech finding without psychiatric explanation is a medical referral, not a longer note.
Circumstance and modality
- Hygiene and clothing findings may reflect housing, water access, transportation, or work schedule — socioeconomic context is explicit at ACA (2014) E.5.b.
- Hypervigilance and guardedness are adaptive in people who have been harmed, including by prior providers.
- Remote assessment constrains what is observable. Document the modality and note what could not be assessed (Luxton et al., 2014; NBCC, 2023, Directives 95, 99).
A client who recently immigrated speaks softly, avoids eye contact, defers to you on every question, and gives short answers through an interpreter. A colleague’s note reads: “Guarded, constricted affect, passive, possible depressive presentation.” What is wrong here, and what would you write instead?
Every descriptor in that note is a plausible cultural or situational finding read as pathology. Softness of voice, gaze aversion, and deference to a professional are normative in many cultures. Short answers through an interpreter reflect the mechanics of interpreted conversation. None of it establishes constricted affect or passivity.
A defensible entry: “Session conducted with a Spanish-language interpreter (name, agency). Client spoke softly with limited eye contact and brief responses; deferential in manner. Given interpreted format and limited baseline, affect and attitude are described with caution and were not compared against a known baseline. Client denied SI/HI when asked directly.”
What that entry does. It records what happened, names the conditions that limit interpretation, and states the limitation openly — which is precisely what APA (2017) Standard 9.06 requires. It leaves the next clinician better informed rather than falsely confident.
The colleague’s note is not unusual, and the error is not carelessness. It is what happens when descriptor vocabulary is applied without asking whose norms define the descriptors.
Watch a mental status exam
Reading about the MSE and watching one are different kinds of learning. Watch at least two of these, and watch them the way you would watch a supervisor: pause and write down what you would have documented, then compare. All open in a new tab.
Full-length practice
Two vignettes. Write a complete MSE for each before revealing the model. Writing it out matters — recognizing a good entry and producing one are different skills, and only the second one shows up in your charts.
A 34-year-old woman arrives fifteen minutes late, hair unbrushed, in clothing she says she slept in. She speaks slowly and quietly, pausing several seconds before answering. She describes her mood as “flat, like nothing registers,” and shows little facial movement throughout, including when describing her daughter. Her account is organized and she answers what is asked. She reports waking at 4 a.m. most days and denies suicidal ideation when asked directly. She knows the date, where she is, and why she came. She says she thinks “something is wrong” but does not know what, and reports she has kept her daughter’s routine intact despite feeling unable to manage her own.
Behavior: psychomotor retardation; minimal spontaneous movement; arrived 15 minutes late.
Attitude: cooperative; answered all questions asked.
Speech: slowed rate, low volume, response latency of several seconds; articulation clear.
Mood: reported as “flat, like nothing registers.”
Affect: markedly reduced facial expression, low intensity, stable throughout including when discussing her daughter; congruent with stated mood.
Thought process: linear and goal-directed.
Thought content: denied suicidal ideation when asked directly; denied homicidal ideation. Reported early morning waking, approximately 4 a.m., most days.
Perception: no perceptual disturbance reported or observed.
Cognition: alert and oriented ×4; attention and memory grossly intact on interview; formal screening not indicated.
Insight: fair — client reports awareness that “something is wrong” without identifying its nature.
Judgment: intact — client has maintained her daughter’s routine despite reported difficulty managing her own.
Check yourself on three things. Did you write “blunted affect” as a conclusion, or describe the reduced expression? Did you keep mood and affect separate? And did you notice that judgment here is intact — she is functioning protectively toward her child — even though nearly every other domain shows impairment? Interns frequently let one impaired domain pull the others down with it.
What does not belong. “Consistent with major depressive episode.” True or not, it is a diagnostic statement and belongs in your assessment section, not here.
A 22-year-old man arrives on time, neatly dressed, and sits at the edge of his chair scanning the room. He speaks rapidly and is difficult to interrupt. He moves between three topics in under a minute — his roommate, a job application, and a theory about his phone — with connections you can partly follow. He says his mood is “great, honestly the best,” and appears bright and expansive. He reports that he has “figured out” that his roommate is monitoring his messages, offers a detailed account, and becomes irritable when you ask how he knows. He denies hearing voices. He reports sleeping “maybe three hours, don’t need more.” He denies suicidal and homicidal ideation. He is oriented and tracks the conversation.
Behavior: seated at edge of chair; scanned the room repeatedly throughout session; no tremor or abnormal movements observed.
Attitude: initially engaged and forthcoming; became irritable when asked to elaborate on the basis for his beliefs about his roommate.
Speech: rapid, increased volume, difficult to interrupt.
Mood: reported as “great, honestly the best.”
Affect: expansive, elevated intensity, congruent with stated mood; irritability observed on one topic.
Thought process: flight of ideas — moved among three topics within approximately one minute with partially discernible connections.
Thought content: reported belief that his roommate is monitoring his messages, held with conviction and detailed elaboration; became irritable when the basis was questioned. Denied suicidal and homicidal ideation. Reported approximately three hours of sleep nightly with no perceived need for more.
Perception: denied auditory hallucinations; none observed.
Cognition: alert and oriented; attention sustained through the interview.
Insight: limited — client does not identify the change in sleep or activity as a concern.
Judgment: not adequately assessed this session; no recent decisions reviewed.
Three things worth noticing. First, the thought-content line describes the belief and its features rather than labeling it a delusion — that is a judgment about fixity and falsity you cannot make from one session. Second, appearance is entirely unremarkable, and recording that accurately is as important as recording the abnormal findings. Third, the judgment line says not adequately assessed, which is honest and far better than guessing.
What does not belong. “Manic episode.” “Paranoid.” “Grandiose.” Each of these is a conclusion. Write what you saw and let the assessment section do the interpretive work with its reasoning visible.
Reading list
Not required for the assessment. Ordered by how useful each is to a counselor early in training.
References
- American Counseling Association. (2014). ACA code of ethics. https://www.counseling.org/resources/ethics
- American Counseling Association. (2026). Counseling ethics and ACA code of ethics resources. https://www.counseling.org/resources/ethics
- American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. American Educational Research Association.
- American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
- American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/ethics-code-2017.pdf
- Boland, R., Verduin, M. L., & Ruiz, P. (2021). Kaplan & Sadock’s synopsis of psychiatry (12th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.
- Dazzi, T., Gribble, R., Wessely, S., & Fear, N. T. (2014). Does asking about suicide and related behaviours induce suicidal ideation? What is the evidence? Psychological Medicine, 44(16), 3361–3363. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714001299
- Folstein, M. F., Folstein, S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (1975). “Mini-mental state”: A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 12(3), 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-3956(75)90026-6
- Lai, M.-C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). Identifying the lost generation of adults with autism spectrum conditions. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2(11), 1013–1027. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00277-1
- Luxton, D. D., Pruitt, L. D., & Osenbach, J. E. (2014). Best practices for remote psychological assessment via telehealth technologies. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 45(1), 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034547
- Nasreddine, Z. S., Phillips, N. A., Bédirian, V., Charbonneau, S., Whitehead, V., Collin, I., Cummings, J. L., & Chertkow, H. (2005). The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA: A brief screening tool for mild cognitive impairment. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 53(4), 695–699. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-5415.2005.53221.x
- National Board for Certified Counselors. (2023). NBCC code of ethics. https://www.nbcc.org/assets/ethics/nbcccodeofethics.pdf
- Polanski, P. J., & Hinkle, J. S. (2000). The mental status examination: Its use by professional counselors. Journal of Counseling & Development, 78(3), 357–364.
- Schwartz, R. C., & Blankenship, D. M. (2014). Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis: A review of empirical literature. World Journal of Psychiatry, 4(4), 133–140. https://doi.org/10.5498/wjp.v4.i4.133
- Sommers-Flanagan, J., & Sommers-Flanagan, R. (2017). Clinical interviewing (6th ed.). Wiley.
- Stanley, B., & Brown, G. K. (2012). Safety planning intervention: A brief intervention to mitigate suicide risk. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 19(2), 256–264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpra.2011.01.001
- Trzepacz, P. T., & Baker, R. W. (1993). The psychiatric mental status examination. Oxford University Press.
- Wiger, D. E. (2021). The psychotherapy documentation primer (4th ed.). Wiley.
- Zuckerman, E. L. (2019). Clinician’s thesaurus (8th ed.). Guilford Press.
Take the assessment
When you have worked through every section and completed the activities, take the Mental Status Exam Training Assessment. You will attest to your study time, answer the knowledge items, and sign the completion statement. Results go to your internship coordinator.
Passing the assessment does not by itself clear you to conduct mental status exams independently. You will administer the MSE under supervision until your clinical supervisor documents that you are ready (APA, 2017, Standard 9.07; ACA, 2014, F.1.a; NBCC, 2023, Directive 44).
Open the assessment →Module MSE-01 · Dr. Darleen Claire Wodzenski, MS ESE, MA CMHC, PhD, LPC, ACS · Orchard Human Services, Inc.
For training and supervision use. Educational content only; not clinical, legal, or supervisory advice for any specific case. Does not substitute for the full text of the ACA, NBCC, or APA codes, Georgia licensure rules, or your agency’s documentation policy. Enter no client information on this page.