Responses are delayed and of decreased length.

Tone, inflection, articulation, and volume are decreased, so speech is quiet, monotone, and less fluent. PMR affects speech in a number of ways, and there are similarities to speech changes in Parkinson’s disease. Speaking involves both cognitive planning tasks and complex motor tasks. When I’m well, I smile frequently and have done a fair bit of public speaking. In this video, I’m not moving far enough to get much of a sense of how ridiculously slow my walking is, but my speech impairment is quite obvious, as is the flat affect.

My experience has been that general practitioners don’t tend to be familiar with what PMR (or at least severe PMR) looks like, and I have to tell them what they’re seeing. Non-clinicians may notice PMR in others but not understand what they’re seeing. reduced movement in the trunk and proximal limbs, i.e.speech changes: decreased volume, slow and monotonous speech with increased pauses, delayed verbal responses and spontaneous speech.lack of facial expressiveness of emotion (“flat affect”).slowed movements that are noticeable to others.PMR can affect multiple aspects of movement, including: What does psychomotor retardation look like?

One study found that a higher number of previous depressive episodes was associated with more severe psychomotor symptoms, and the researchers suggested that PMR may be like a scar of past depressive episodes. PMR is one of the DSM-5’s symptom criteria for a major depressive episode, and it’s part of the cluster of symptoms in the melancholic features specifier. It’s been described as far back as Ancient Greek times. Psychomotor retardation, one of the less common but more outwardly observable symptoms of depression, involves a slowing of movement and thoughts. This week’s term is psychomotor retardation (PMR). In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms.

Flat affect depression