Developed from years of teaching psychiatry to medical students and residents, this comprehensive text meets a need in the teaching of literature and will be valuable to both students first learining about the MSE and seasoned clinicians seeking an informative reference. The clinical relevance of mental status abnormalities is illustrated through frequent examples of disorders that can cause the particular signs and symptoms defined in each chapter. A final chapter describing fictional case histories with hypothetical examples of written mental status reports will be particularly useful for those learining to write such reports. This text is an important addition to the libraries of students and practitioners who work with psychiatric patients and should help to simplify and organize a challenging task.