The Evaluation of Treatment Methods by Rating and Self-Rating Scales

  • Detlev von Zerssen
Chapter

Abstract

In spite of the widespread and still increasing use of rating as well as self-rating scales in the evaluation of psychiatric treatment methods there is as yet a lot of skepticism among clinicians as to the utility of these devices. At best, they argue, will the application of such scales confirm what good clinicians already know. But do they, indeed, know so much about the efficacy and the side effects of the various treatment methods in the large variety of mental disorders and is there always agreement among them? General experience does not concord with such assumptions! Nevertheless, in one respect clinical conceptions are thoroughly confirmed by statistical analyses of data collected by means of rating scales: If these scales include a large set of items covering, more or less, the total spectrum of psychopathological symptoms as described in textbooks of clinical psychiatry and if item scores were obtained from large and diagnostically heterogeneous samples of psychiatric patients representative of a newly admitted hospital population, then the application of various kinds of factor- as well as cluster-analyses to the data usually reveals symptom patterns that correspond very closely to the textbook descriptions of the main syndromes of psychopathology. The factors of the well-known Inpatient Multidimensional Psychiatric Scale (IMPS: 1) are a good example for this agreement between statistically and clinically conceived syndromes (2,3,4).

Keywords

Psychopathological Symptom Depressive Syndrome Hamilton Depression Scale Neuroleptic Medication Schizophrenic Psychos 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1985

Authors and Affiliations

  • Detlev von Zerssen
    • 1
  1. 1.Max-Planck-Institut für PsychiatrieMunichGermany

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