Diagnostic Testing for Psych Conditions

[ISU_Steve]

I hope you all don't mind me coming over to pick your brains (my normal haunt is the predental side of SDN). I am a psychology major (second semester) and I have been given a task by my professor who is helping me in my attempts to set up a research project and I need to find out what the best screening tests for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders are.

Basically, if you were to attempt to determine the frequency of a disorder among a subset of medical patients what standard measures would you utilize? How do you interpret them?

Also are there screening tests for psychological dependence upon a medication?

I apologize for all the questions. I would really appreciate any help you all can offer. Thanks.

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[PsyDRxPnow]

I am a second year doctoral student (PsyD a clinical doctorate degree). It is my opinion that you consider the MMPI-2. This is a multi phasic personality inventory which can diagnose, by any experienced psychologist, several psychological/personality disorders including anxiety and OCD.

If you’re not interested in committing to the MMPI try the Beck Anxiety Inventory for anxiety disorder.

 

[ISU_Steve]

Thank you for the help. It's very much appreciated.

 

[LM02]

I'm not an expert in assessment per se, but I would never use an MMPI-2 as a stand-alone measure to diagnose DSM-IV psychopathology. It is certainly useful to inform your assessment. However, I would use it in tandem with a clinical interview, SCID, etc.

For OCD, the most common screening measure is the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). Personally, I would go with that for screening in a general medical population. If you do a lit search, you will find tons of information about it.

For general anxiety symptoms, I recommend you look up the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The BAI is decent, but it is heavily weighted toward the somatic symptoms of anxiety.

Good luck!

 

[ISU_Steve]

Thanks for all the suggestions....

 

[PsyDRxPnow]

I'm not an expert in assessment per se, but I would never use an MMPI-2 as a stand-alone measure to diagnose DSM-IV psychopathology. It is certainly useful to inform your assessment. However, I would use it in tandem with a clinical interview, SCID, etc.

For OCD, the most common screening measure is the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). Personally, I would go with that for screening in a general medical population. If you do a lit search, if you will find tons of information about it.

For general anxiety symptoms, I recommend you look up the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The BAI is decent, but it is heavily weighted toward the somatic symptoms of anxiety.

Good luck!

I concur; no test should be used void of a full psych. hx. That is why I suggest that the test or any other psych test should be administered and applied by an experienced clinical psychologist who, within their practice will utilize a standard full psych hx with any psych test. No singe test should be used to diagnose any individual.

 

[ISU_Steve]

I concur; no test should be used void of a full psych. hx. That is why I suggest that the test or any other psych test should be administered and applied by an experienced clinical psychologist who, within their practice will utilize a standard full psych hx with any psych test. No singe test should be used to diagnose any individual.

The idea is to screen for various conditions (as discussed before) in a sample of COPD patients in order to get a more accurate idea of the frequency of these conditions. The information is needed to support some planned clinical research later on into placebo effects.

The plan had been to involve one of the Psy.D professors from the psychology department at our university in order to assure we go about assessing the patients in an appropriate manner, but I have just been assigned by the Ph.D who is assisting me in this study (since it was my idea, he's letting me run the show to get a feel for how things are done in regards to setting up and running a research project) to come up with some manner of screening for the study subjects. If anyone has any further suggestions, it would be most helpful. Everything that has been suggested so far has been very, very useful in aiding in putting together this study. I'm relatively new to the psychology side of things (I'm more used to the hard core lab sciences) so please excuse me if I seem a little unsure of what I am doing in regards to the proper approaches to things....

 

[sasevan]

I hope you all don't mind me coming over to pick your brains (my normal haunt is the predental side of SDN). I am a psychology major (second semester) and I have been given a task by my professor who is helping me in my attempts to set up a research project and I need to find out what the best screening tests for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders are.

Basically, if you were to attempt to determine the frequency of a disorder among a subset of medical patients what standard measures would you utilize? How do you interpret them?

Also are there screening tests for psychological dependence upon a medication?

I apologize for all the questions. I would really appreciate any help you all can offer. Thanks.

Hi ISU_Steve,

I suggest checking out the following additional measures to see if they meet your need:

Anxiety/Obsessive-Compulsive disorders:
Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis)
Problem Behavior Inventory (Silverton)

Dependence on medications:
Millon Behavioral Medicine Diagnostic (Millon, Antoni, Millon, Meagher, Grossman)
Multidimensional Health Profile, Health Functioning/Psychosocial Functioning (Ruehlman, Lanyon, Karoly)

Peace.

P.S.

Dissent is the most honest of all patriotic acts.

very cool

 

[ISU_Steve]

Thanks..... The help is very much appreciated.

 

[psychgeek]

Anxiety is a tricky thing to measure in a medically comorbid population. A lot of the somatic signs of anxiety are similar to somatic symptoms of medical illnesses. Y-BOSC should work well for OCD but I would worry about STAI and BAI for the anxiety measure. If it were me, I’d use the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale instead. It is intended for use in a hospital setting and is one of the most widely accepted measures used in psychosomatic medicine.

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