Depression Nursing process: Negative Symptoms

Nursing process: Negative Symptoms

• Affect: The feeling state or emotional tone
  • Inappropriate affect: Emotions are incongruent with the circumstances
  • Bland: Weak emotional tone
  • Flat: Appears to be void of emotional tone
  • Apathy: Disinterest in the environment
• Avolition: Impairment in the ability to initiate goal-directed activity
  • Emotional ambivalence: Coexistence of opposite emotions toward same object, person, or situation
  • Deterioration in appearance: Impaired personal  grooming and self-care activities
• Impaired interpersonal functioning and relationship to the external world
  • Impaired social interaction: Clinging and intruding on the personal space of others, exhibiting behaviors that are not culturally and socially acceptable
  • Social isolation: A focus inward on the self to the exclusion of the external environment
• Lack of insight
  • Anergia: deficiency of energy
  • Anhedonia: Inability to experience pleasure
• Lack of abstract thinking ability
• Associated features
  • Waxy flexibility: Passive yielding of all movable parts of the body to any effort made at placing them in certain positions
  • Posturing: Voluntary assumption of inappropriate or bizarre postures
• Pacing and rocking: Pacing back and forth and rocking the body
• Regression: Retreat to an earlier level of development
• Eye movement abnormalities