Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with the opportunity to analyze and synthesize the components of a complete psychiatric assessment with clinical interventions, based on evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and theoretical knowledge. This assignment allows you to demonstrate your ability to complete a full mental health assessment of your selected client’s current psychological, physical, and social functioning. You should be able to demonstrate critical thinking and to correlate theory and practice.

Instructions

1. Select a client or case that you have worked within either your practice or your practicum setting. Ensure that you correctly redact the appropriate information (name, etc.).
2. Prepare a full mental health evaluation of your client. Use the resources presented in the course to help guide your evaluation. Kaplan & Saddock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry has a robust list of the categories of information you should collect and present in your evaluation report (5.1. Parts of the Initial Psychiatric Interview). This should include the following:
   1. A full psychiatric, physical, social, family, and work history including verbal reports of the client, your observations of the client, and a summary of any diagnostic aids that you have used.
   2. The use of at least one psychiatric screening or assessment tool from the literature to assist in your assessment of the client
   3. A full physical assessment in addition to the mental status exam and psychiatric history
3. Develop a DSM-5 diagnostic assessment:
   1. Support your diagnosis through a thoughtful, evidence-based analysis of the data collected in your evaluation.
4. Propose a practical, evidence-based plan of care:
   1. Keep in mind the role of the psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner is to assess all aspects of the patient’s health status, including health promotion, health protection, and disease prevention. Psychiatric care is interdisciplinary. Your plan of care may include the use of other mental health professionals for the delivery of appropriate care. For example, someone who has been chronically out of work and whose unemployed status has contributed to his or her depression might require social work or educational assessment to address that aspect of the client’s poor psychological functioning.

Requirements

1. Support your assessment, diagnosis, and treatment plan with appropriate literature citations.
2. The paper should be no more than 10 pages in length, not including a title page and references.
3. Use current APA formatting and citations.
4. Acronyms should not be used.
5. The assessment must be well written and be of professional quality. It must be clear, logically developed, and free of spelling, grammatical, and syntactical errors. Use full sentences.
6. The psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner employs evidence-based clinical practice guidelines to guide screening activities, identifies health promotion needs, and provides anticipatory guidance and counseling addressing environmental, lifestyle, and developmental issues.