ABSTRACT
Introduction When people undergo an emergency psychiatric evaluation or are admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the clinicians evaluating them will try to determine whether they have a mental illness. ey will perform a “mental status exam” to see whether the patient has a thought disorder, one indication of mental illness. e mental status exam is essentially an attempt to get inside the head of the person and understand how he or she thinks. e clinician will draw conclusions based on observations of behavior, reports from others, and, most importantly, by listening to what patients say and how they say it. Among other things, the clinician will be looking for evidence of language dysuency, of odd, unusual expressions of language, because these are oen indicators of mental illness.
