Content area
Full Text
The length and expense of comprehensive personality disorder interviews makes them unwieldy for routine use. A brief but sensitive screen could eliminate administration of longer instruments in many instances. We describe the development of the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen (IPDS)-a mini-structured interview which can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Retrospective analyses using 1,203 SIDP-R interviews suggested that the IPDS items should provide good sensitivity and specificity. We present results from a prospective validation study, using a mixed group of 52 nonpsychotic inpatients and outpatients who were diagnosed using the SIDP-IV. Blind administration of the IPDS yielded excellent sensitivity (92%) and good specificity (79%), using a subset of five screening items. Addition of two more items leads to an estimated sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 86%. The IPDS shows promise as a quick personality disorder screen for use in research settings or standard clinical interviews.
The comprehensive assessment of DSM personality disorder (PD) can be a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. Understandably, in making Axis II diagnoses, most clinicians rely instead upon their experience and acumen to guide a focused clinical interview (Westen, 1997). This approach may be adequate in some instances for seasoned mental health practitioners. However, it may prove wanting for trainees, general medical practitioners, and auxiliary mental health personnel. We therefore believe that the development of a brief set of screening items, sensitive for a broad range of personality disorders and validated against a comprehensive structured interview, would be of great benefit.
A sensitive initial personality disorder screen would also be of obvious value to mental health researchers. The current "gold standards" for categorical personality diagnosis consist of detailed structured or semistructured interviews, such as the Structured Interview For DSM-IV Personality Disorders (SIDP-IV) (Pfohl, Blum, & Zimmerman, 1995; Stangl, Pfohl, Zimmerman, Bowers, & Corenthal, 1985), the Personality Disorder Examination (PDE; Loranger, Susman, Oldham, & Russakoff, 1987; Loranger, in press), the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Personality Disorders (SCID-II) (First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1995; First, Gibbon, Spitzer, Williams, & Benjamin, 1997), the Personality Disorder Interview-IV (Widiger, Mangine, Corbitt, Ellis, & Thomas,1995), and the Diagnostic Interview for Personality Disorders (Zanarini, Frankenburg, Chauncey, & Gunderson, 1987; Zanarini, Frankenburg, Sickel, & Young, 1996). These instruments systematically cover all diagnostic criteria for each DSM...