Assignment: Assessing, Diagnosing, and Treating Adults With Mood Disorders

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It is important for the PMHNP to have a comprehensive understanding of mood disorders in order to assess and accurately formulate a diagnosis and treatment plan for patients presenting with these disorders. Mood disorders may be diagnosed when a patient’s emotional state meets the diagnostic criteria for severity, functional impact, and length of time. Those with a mood disorder may find that their emotions interfere with work, relationships, or other parts of their lives that impact daily functioning. Mood disorders may also lead to substance abuse or suicidal thoughts or behaviors, and although they are not likely to go away on their own, they can be managed with an effective treatment plan and understanding of how to manage symptoms.

In this Assignment you will assess, diagnose, and devise a treatment plan for a patient in a case study who is presenting with a mood disorder.

To Prepare

• Review this week’s Learning Resources. Consider the insights they provide about assessing, diagnosing, and treating mood disorders.
• Review the Focused SOAP Note template, which you will use to complete this Assignment. There is also a Focused SOAP Note Exemplar provided as a guide for Assignment expectations.
• Review the video, Case Study: Petunia Park. You will use this case as the basis of this Assignment. In this video, a Walden faculty member is assessing a mock patient. The patient will be represented onscreen as an avatar.
• Consider what history would be necessary to collect from this patient.
• Consider what interview questions you would need to ask this patient.

The Assignment

Develop a Focused SOAP Note, including your differential diagnosis and critical-thinking process to formulate a primary diagnosis. Incorporate the following into your responses in the template:

• Subjective: What details did the patient provide regarding their chief complaint and symptomatology to derive your differential diagnosis? What is the duration and severity of their symptoms? How are their symptoms impacting their functioning in life? 
• Objective: What observations did you make during the psychiatric assessment?  
• Assessment: Discuss the patient’s mental status examination results. What were your differential diagnoses? Provide a minimum of three possible diagnoses with supporting evidence, listed in order from highest to lowest priority. Compare the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for each differential diagnosis and explain what DSM-5 criteria rules out the differential diagnosis to find an accurate diagnosis. Explain the critical-thinking process that led you to the primary diagnosis you selected. Include pertinent positives and pertinent negatives for the specific patient case.
• Plan: What is your plan for psychotherapy? What is your plan for treatment and management, including alternative therapies? Include pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatments, alternative therapies, and follow-up parameters as well as a rationale for this treatment and management plan. Also incorporate one health promotion activity and one patient education strategy.
• Reflection notes: What would you do differently with this client if you could conduct the session again? Discuss what your next intervention would be if you were able to follow up with this patient. Also include in your reflection a discussion related to legal/ethical considerations (demonstrate critical thinking beyond confidentiality and consent for treatment!), health promotion, and disease prevention that takes into consideration patient factors (such as age, ethnic group, etc.), PMH, and other risk factors (e.g., socioeconomic, cultural background, etc.).

Focus of the Final Paper

The U.S. health care system has numerous known issues that affect the overall quality, access, and cost of services available. For your Final Paper, you will create an eight- to ten-page proposal (excluding the title and reference pages) on your solution to one of these issues. In the proposal, you will describe the nature of the issue, trace the history of its development, describe what has and has not been done to address it thus far, provide a set of recommendations on what should be done to address it in the future, and discuss how major stakeholders should be involved to make your proposed changes.

Select one of the following issues in health care for the topic of your Final Paper:

1. The cost of health care

2. The health care workforce

3. The uninsured and under-insured population

4. Medical and health information technology

5. Select your own topic. If you would like to use a topic other than the ones listed above, you must get approval from your instructor by the end of Week Two of the course.

Specifically, you should address the following in your proposal:

1. Executive Summary: Provide a brief overview of content of your proposal.

2. Statement of the problem: Define and analyze the major problems related to this issue.

3. History of the problem: Review the major developments in the evolution of this problem in the U.S. How did this issue develop historically? How did we get to where we are now?

4. International context: Compare and contrast this problem in the U.S. to that of other countries. How does this issue in the U.S. compare to other countries? Is the issue more common here or in other countries and why?

5. Stakeholders: Describe the role of major stakeholders in the problem. How have federal and state governments and the health care industry worked to address this issue so far? What have been the successes and failures of their attempts?

6. Policy: Have the P.P.A.C.A. and other federal policies addressed this issue? What has been the impact of their action or non-action?

7. Recommendations: What should the government, the health care industry, and health care consumers do to address this issue in the future? Which stakeholders need to be involved to implement these recommendations and how? Provide a justification for why you believe each recommendation will address one or more of the problems related to this issue.

8. Conclusion: Construct a brief conclusion that highlights the key points from your proposal and describes the expected outcomes if your recommendations were to be implemented.

For this assignment, assume a large employer is closing in the community. In the Longevin family the grandfather, Joe (age 60), the daughter Angela (age 40), and the grandson, Peter (age 20), are all losing their jobs. When Joe was 42 he was diagnosed with depression, but has controlled this for the past few years. You can embellish this scenario as needed, including cultural implications, to address the following elements in this assignment:

• Compare and contrast the three career stages of Joe, Angela, and Peter.
• How might their roles change from this job loss? What factors would you consider in the job loss, including mental well-being? What strategies would you use to help with these changes?
• What strategies would you use to develop a lifelong learning philosophy with each person in this family?
• In the previous unit you learned about different assessment instruments. Name one assessment you would use for each person and describe the criteria you used for this choice.
• Assess the cultural appropriateness of the assessments you chose for each client.

Your assignment should be 3–4 pages in length, follow APA format and style, and include at least three references, including your text. Review the Job Loss Case Study Scoring Guide to understand the grading expectations for this assignment.