Assignment: Psychiatric Disorders and Screening Essay

Assignment: Psychiatric Disorders and Screening Essay

Assignment: Psychiatric Disorders and Screening Essay

The depression screening tool most appropriate to screen KF is the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) -9. The questionnaire contains nine items, each of which is scored 0 to 3, and provides a 0 to 27 severity score (Manea, Gilbody & McMillan, 2015). The tool uses a time frame of two weeks and assesses for the presence of depressive symptoms and their severity. To screen for anxiety, I will use the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7), which is an easy to use initial screening tool for generalized anxiety disorder. The tool uses a time frame of two weeks, and it also screens for panic, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders (Plummer, Manea, Trepel & McMillan, 2016). It has seven items that are scored 0 to 3 and has a severity score of 0 to 21. It categorizes the severity of the anxiety disorder as minimal, mild, moderate, or severe anxiety.

In the PHQ-9, the questions that could be scored include: Little interest or pleasure in doing things? Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?, Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much? Feeling tired or having little energy? Poor appetite or overeating?

Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television? (Manea, Gilbody & McMillan, 2015) As per the patient’s history, KF would get a score of 18. The severity is categorized as moderately severe. Using the GAD-7 tool, the questions that would be scored include: Feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge? Not being able to stop or control worrying? (Plummer et al., 2016). The score will be 2, which is classified as minimal anxiety.

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The next step will involve doing a complete physical examination to rule out the presence of an underlying organ pathology such as endocrine disorders. I will also order for lab work-ups such as complete blood count and TSH level to exclude medical illnesses and establish the baseline values (Olfson, Blanco & Marcus, 2016). The mental health differential diagnosis is Major depression and bipolar disease, while physical health differential is Hypothyroidism.

Treatment therapy should involve active treatment with psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. Combined therapy is associated with high rates of improvement in depressive symptoms, better treatment compliance, and increased quality of life (Olfson, Blanco & Marcus, 2016).

Medication: Prozac with an initial dose of 20 mg daily dose, which will be increased gradually to a maximum dose of 80 mg per day (Olfson, Blanco & Marcus, 2016). Prozac belongs to the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and acts by selectively inhibiting presynaptic serotonin reuptake with minimal effect on the reuptake of dopamine or norepinephrine (Olfson, Blanco & Marcus, 2016). It will be appropriate for KF since it has low toxicity in overdose and has less prominent adverse effects. There should be an improvement in KF’s symptoms within 6 to 8 weeks after initiation of treatment with Prozac.

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Assignment: Psychiatric Disorders and Screening Essay

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