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Symptom Questionnaire Validity in Assessing the Need for Psychiatrists' Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

A. Richman
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, and Section of Social Psychiatry
H. C. Slade
Affiliation:
Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia, and Department of Medicine, Vancouver General Hospital

Extract

In recent years there have been an increasing number of attempts to survey the distribution of psychiatric morbidity, or to estimate the need for psychiatric treatment, in the general population. Various methods of defining or diagnosing psychiatric illnesses have been used (Blum, 3; Scott, 20). These methods include interviews by psychiatrists (Lin, 17; Essen-Müller, 13; Hagnell, 14); the judgment of family physicians (11; Kessel, 16; Shapiro and Fink, 21); the use of self-administered symptom check lists (White et al., 23); and structured interviews by non-psychiatrists relating to symptom occurrence, attitudes, personality scales, etc. This paper outlines an attempt to determine some of the relationships between the results of a symptom-questionnaire; the diagnoses recorded by physicians; and the physicians' request for psychiatric consultation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1966 

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