Demi Lovato said,
I wish people could understand that the brain is the most important organ of the body. Just because you cannot see mental illness like you can see a broken bone doesn’t mean it is not as detrimental or devastating for an individual or a family.
Truly said and very beautifully explained the importance of mental health awareness. The first step is to identify a disease. A mental health Performa lists down all the necessary questions to be asked and then easily evaluated and analyzed by expert psychologists and psychiatrists together.
So is the purpose of a mental health intake form where the general mental health of a person is assessed for further management or decisions.
The forms consist of usual introductory spaces to be filled which include name, sex, age, date of birth, contact details, and doctor’s details.
Giving more importance to what the patient has to say about himself, we give the next part of the form to the complaints of the patient. We ask if he is suffering from anything that he wants to mention. We need to know when these complaints started to appear and if he had suffered the same in the past. Did he consult any doctor and was he given any medicine for it? What are the relieving and aggravating factors of his complaint?
This gives a general idea of the patient’s current mental status and you can go further in the right direction.
Some direct questions can be asked by the doctors that help in the direct evaluation of mental health. Any obvious signs of anxiety, depression, and sadness are asked. Any recent changes in mood and behavior like loss of appetite or loss of interest in previously interesting tasks. He is asked about his mood changes and excessive irritability. We also compare his current activity level to differentiate between normal and abnormal behavior.
We are not just concerned about the lazy lethargic changes in a person. But we also want to check if he is showing any recent state of hyperactivity, mania, and euphoria. We want to know if he is too active to focus on a single task and if he is too unrealistically optimistic about his circumstances.
Medical history is again asked in the next section. His past and present medical and surgical history, his current and past medications, and any history of hospitalization are inquired.
Family history has a very strong association with mental health. One’s mental growth and personality development are widely based upon life circumstances since early childhood. An adopted child with discriminative behavior has definitely an entirely different personality than the biological child. So we ask certain questions regarding the family of the patient. His relationship with his parents and siblings is asked as well as the relationship between the parents and how he was raised and in which circumstances.
We know if the parents are married, divorced, or separated. We are also interested to know about any family member who is suffering from or has suffered from any mental illness.
