... a female in her mid 50s ... polo shirt and i think he said very tight leopard skinned capris with a sun visor on her head, clean and neat who presented for a psychiatric evaluation for disability. Interviewer said when she walked in his office she began to cry for no particular reason. Staff she was whining out in the waiting room wanting her daughter to go into the interview with her but of course the preference of her being interviewed alone was told to her. Says she was very difficult to interview and he believes that it was a passive aggressive attempt to provide retribution by not allowing her daughter to come back with her, although when he confronted her with his supposition she emphatically denied it.
However on mental status exam, she presented as whiny, melodramatic mood and initially sat and just stared, without providing him any information to his questions; extremely concrete, inattentive, and he had to challenge her 4 different times to respond appropriately to questions. When he asked her what type of mood she was in, she stared back with a puzzled face saying "what do you mean?" This was her answer to most every question he posed to her. Her speech at times was incoherent, oppositional and vague ... extremely unusual and inconsistent. when asked to count backwards from 20 down to 1, spell the word "dog" or "boat" she stared blankly didn't respond and he believed she was just angry and refusing to respond appropriately like when he asked her the color of the table they were sitting at she said, "what color?" ...
Who goes to apply for disability and acts like that?
At the end of his report he concluded that he could not tell if she was passively aggessively angry and opositional and resistant, or whether she was suffering from dementia or some type of organicity. He got the feeling that there was lack of motivation to not be truly forthcoming but he couldn't be sure. He did not have any records from the disability office as to any medical reports and/or psychological reports about her history, daughter did not want to be interviewed, so therefore he told the disability office that perhaps they'd want another interviewer to give it a go...
a strange little bird she was.
At a (thankfully considerable) distance, the woman sounds like somebody who wants and expects to get her own way. The examiner could probably have stated, "does not play well with others."
ReplyDeletethat is sooooo true!
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