8/23/2023 0 Comments What is flat affect![]() Survivors with flat or flattened affect often find that as their injury heals, they experience a wider range of emotions. Many survivors with flat affect report little desire to participate in activities that they previously enjoyed or weak motivation for therapy. However if the person feels little emotion to begin with, it is often difficult to arouse more than minimal motivation. If a person feels strongly that he or she wants to accomplish a goal, then motivation there will clearly be high. Sometimes, loved ones mistakenly assume that the flat affect implies depression or anger.Ī further complication is that the lack of or decline in the experiencing of emotions can also impact motivation to engage in activities. This may include learning to show facial expressions appropriate to the emotion associated with a given social interaction, even if the person is not feeling said emotion or perhaps not feeling the emotion very strongly. Many survivors with a flat affect need to be retaught social skills so as to allow for improved social functioning. It may feel to the other person like the survivor is now almost robotic in most interactions. For instance, a friend might find it odd that a warm smile is not reciprocated with a similar smile by the survivor. Other people may find it awkward or off-putting when the survivor does not display the emotions that would be normally expected in a given situation. Rather than traversing the hills and valleys of normal emotional fluctuation, the person’s emotional experience is more akin to that of an even surface or flattened plain.Īs we are social beings, a flat affect can of course interfere with social relationships. It is simply that the person’s brain is no longer capable of experiencing the strong emotions we generally associate with having encountered such a situation. This is not to say that the person does not understand the importance of each situation. A survivor with a flat affect may be told that a friend has died and blandly state, “That is too bad.” The same survivor could be told that he or she has won a huge contest and simply say, “That is nice.” Instead of being distraught and tearful in the first example or excited and elated in the second, everything ends up feeling to the survivor similarly ordinary. This symptom is most common in right-sided brain injuries. I would like to take a moment to explain one of those terms, “flat (or flattened) affect.”Ī flat (or flattened) affect is when a person does not display or experience emotions with the same intensity that he or she did before an injury so that the affect (mood) of the individual in question appears to be unchanging (flat). Learning to understand all these new terms while attempting to cope with an already trying experience can be quite dizzying. (f) certain symptoms, for which supplementary information is provided, that represent important problems in medical care in their own right.There are so many terms that family and friends of brain injury survivors are exposed to that are simply not part of our day to day vocabulary.(e) cases in which a more precise diagnosis was not available for any other reason.(d) cases referred elsewhere for investigation or treatment before the diagnosis was made.(c) provisional diagnosis in a patient who failed to return for further investigation or care.(b) signs or symptoms existing at the time of initial encounter that proved to be transient and whose causes could not be determined.(a) cases for which no more specific diagnosis can be made even after all the facts bearing on the case have been investigated.The conditions and signs or symptoms included in categories R00- R94 consist of:.8, are generally provided for other relevant symptoms that cannot be allocated elsewhere in the classification. The Alphabetical Index should be consulted to determine which symptoms and signs are to be allocated here and which to other chapters. Practically all categories in the chapter could be designated 'not otherwise specified', 'unknown etiology' or 'transient'. In general, categories in this chapter include the less well-defined conditions and symptoms that, without the necessary study of the case to establish a final diagnosis, point perhaps equally to two or more diseases or to two or more systems of the body. Signs and symptoms that point rather definitely to a given diagnosis have been assigned to a category in other chapters of the classification.This chapter includes symptoms, signs, abnormal results of clinical or other investigative procedures, and ill-defined conditions regarding which no diagnosis classifiable elsewhere is recorded.
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