MSE: Insight

Conscious awareness and understanding of one's own condition, symptoms, and the reasons behind them.

Absent Insight

No recognition that anything is wrong; symptoms are experienced as simple fact.

Anosognosia

Inability to recognize that one has a neurologic or psychiatric illness; the loss of insight has a brain basis.

Denial

Keeping an unpleasant reality out of awareness because acknowledging it would produce anxiety. It is the mechanism behind much of what is recorded as poor insight.

Emotional Insight “True Insight”

Understanding one's situation at a level deep enough that it actually drives change in behavior and personality.

Externalization

The broader tendency to see elements of one's own personality, moods, and conflicts as belonging to the outside world rather than to oneself.

Full Insight

Recognizes the presence of illness, understands it as illness, and accepts the need for treatment.

Impaired Insight

Reduced ability to understand the objective reality of one's own situation.

Impaired Reality Testing

Unable to make that distinction; the experience is held as literally true.

Intact Reality Testing

Able to distinguish internally generated experience from external reality, even while the experience continues.

Intellectual Insight

Knowing and being able to state the reality of one's situation, but without being able to use that knowledge to change anything.

Partial Insight

Acknowledges that something is wrong, or accepts some symptoms as illness, while attributing others to external causes.

Projection

Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or impulses to someone else.

Rationalization

Justifying unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings with plausible but untrue reasons, so that they become tolerable to admit.