Handbook of Psychiatric Measures: Second Edition

Offers a concise summary of key evaluations that clinicians can use in daily practice to enhance the quality of patient care in terms of both diagnosis and assessment of outcomes. Comprising a wide range of methods available for assessing persons with mental health problems, it contains more than 275 rating methods, from the Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale to the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale. In this fully revised edition, more than 40 measures have been added to the discussion and to the CD-ROM. In addition to reassessing measures for inclusion - adding measures that empirically provide better patient evaluation and subtracting measures that have been superseded - chapter authors have thoroughly examined and revised measure discussions to provide the most relevant and timely information for clinicians. Costs, translations, and contact information for each measure have also been updated. This handy compendium includes both diagnostic tools and measures of symptoms, function and quality of life, medication side effects, and other clinically relevant parameters, focusing on those measures that can be easily used in either clinical practice or research. Most of the measures are designed to improve the reliability and validity of patient assessment over what might be accomplished in a standard clinical interview and demonstrate that the use of formal measures can improve the collection, synthesis, and reporting of information as compared with the use of unstructured examinations. Seventeen disorder-specific chapters, organized in DSM-IV order, include measures for disorders of childhood and adolescence, cognitive disorders, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, sleep disorders, aggression, and more. The discussion of each measure includes goals, description, practical issues, psychometric properties, and clinical utility, followed by references and suggested readings. This revised edition includes updated measure descriptions, new measure variants and research, and newly selected measures particularly appropriate to the domain of discussion. As a clinical tool, this book: describes how, when, and to what purpose measures are used; points out practical issues to consider in choosing a measure for clinical use; addresses limitations in the use of measures including ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that influence their interpretation. Use of this special resource is further enhanced by a CD-ROM containing the full text of 150 these measures - an invaluable aid for reference and clinical decision-making.