Psychiatric case identification in general practice: Self‐rating versus interview

Abstract

Sixty‐four general practice patients diagnosed by a general practitioner as psychiatrically disturbed and 42 patients judged by the general practitioner as psychologically healthy, were interviewed by psychiatrists by means of the “Schedule for a Standardized Assessment of Depressive Disorders” (SADD) developed by WHO. A subsample of 77 patients also filled out the “General Health Questionnaire” (GHQ) by Goldberg. A relatively high agreement between the “General Health Questionnaire” and the psychiatrist's judgement (after interviewing the patient with the SADD) was found. The agreement between the GHQ and the psychiatrist's diagnosis was higher for the psychiatrist's diagnosis of depression than for his diagnosis of “general psychiatric disturbance”. It is recommended to use the “General Health Questionnaire” as a screening tool in general practice.

The GHQ-28 questionnaire in French: a validation survey in a panel of 158 general psychiatric patients

“…In its complete form, in the shortened 30-item and 12-item versions (Goldberg, 1978) or in the scaled 28-item derived from factor analysis (Goldberg and Hillier, 1979), it was translated into many different languages, eg Italian (Fontanesi et al, 1985), Spanish (Lobo et al, 1986) and French (Bolognini et al, 1989;Pariente and Guelfi, 1990). These versions were internationally validated and used throughout the general population (eg Tarnopolovsky et al, 1979;Benjamin et al, 1982;Banks, 1983;Chan and Chan, 1983;Bolognini et al, 1989), in general practice (Marks et al, 1979;Katschnig et al, 1980;Cleary et al, 1982;Hobbs et al, 1983 andSkuse and Williams, 1984;Bellantuono et al, 1987;Goldberg and Bridges, 1987) or more specialized cases, such as in neurology (Rabins and Brooks, 1981;Bridges and Goldberg, 1986) or cardiology (Vazquez-Barquero et al, 1985).…”

Psychiatric morbidity and referral rates in general practices: Comparison of an industrial town and a rural area in West Germany

“…Agreement between general practitioners and psychiatrists on the identification of psychiatric cases was of the same order as in a comparable study conducted some years ago in Vienna (Katschnig et al 1980), as well as in a recently completed field survey in three communities of Upper Bavaria (Dilling et al 1984). The specificity of the general practitioners' case-finding -i.e.…”

General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) in general hospitals: selecting a set of items using a stepwise hierarchical procedure

“…As we used the Lickert-scaled version (0, 1, 2, 3), the scoring range is from 0 to 90. The 30-item GHQ was translated into German and validated in a primary health care sample against standardized psychiatric interviews by Katschnig, Berner, Haushofer, Barfuss and Seelig (1980), and was used in a variety of studies (for example, Pakesch, Katschnig, Dittrich, Loimer, Rasinger and Tutsch, 1993).…”