Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency prepares doctors for careers in a broad range of health care settings. To ensure participants' competency in places with fewer resources, such as rural practices, Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency provides more training in emergency psychiatry in comparison to other programs.

1. HOW PHYSICIANS SCREEN FOR
PSYCHOSIS
Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency

2. INTRODUCTION
 Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency prepares doctors for
careers in a broad range of health care settings. To ensure participants'
competency in places with fewer resources, such as rural practices,
Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency provides more training in
emergency psychiatry in comparison to other programs.
Any physician with emergency psychiatry responsibilities must know
how to assess for psychosis. This primarily involves screening for reality
disturbances, which are present in all psychotic cases. The physician
needs to evaluate whether the patient is subject to visual or auditory
hallucinations as well as false or irrational beliefs, known as delusions.
The physician assessing for psychosis will also evaluate whether the
patient's rational thinking capacity is impaired. The patient may be
confused, and thoughts may be disorganized or illogical. In some cases,
the patient also presents as particularly manic in his or her thought
expressions.

3. PSYCHOSIS
 The disorganized thinking and loss of reality testing involved in
psychosis may also make a patient emotionally unstable. For this
reason, physicians also assess whether the patient seems or has
seemed irritable, explosive, or suspicious of others.
A physician evaluating psychosis is also likely to check for excessive
introspection or withdrawn mood. Because patients with psychosis can
no longer process thoughts and stimuli normally, they often regress to a
level of self-focus more common in earlier stages of development. This
may also lead to problems with impulse control and difficulty maintaining
normal ego boundaries, both of which can be signs of a potential
psychosis.
Physicians evaluate each of these signs with a consideration of each
experience's nature, duration, and recurrence. They will assess level of
impairment and determine the patient's degree of insight into his or her
experience. All of this information then helps in the development of a
diagnosis and treatment plan.