Components of the Psychiatric Interview and Importance of the Elements
The psychiatric interview is crucial in building a rapport with the patient to collect data about current and past mental health and medical
conditions and relevant developmental, interpersonal, and social history. The three important components of the psychiatric interview that I consider
important are the Standard for Clinician’s Interview in Psychiatric (SCIP), which provides diagnosis consistent with DSM criteria (Aboraya et al., 2016).
It helps collect dimensional scores, diagnostic classification of psychiatric disorders, and numeric data; the etiological components help psychiatrists and
psychologists determine the cause of clients’ mental health conditions. The etiology of mental health condition can be attributed to genetic components,
substance abuse, or an early loss of a parent, which can result in the patient suffering severe psychological trauma; and the disorder classification
component enables the psychiatrist and psychologist during collection and examination of patients to classify the disorder the patient present and treat
appropriately (Aboraya et al., 2016).
Psychometric Properties of Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS)
The psychometric properties of the PANSS measure the severity of the positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and general psychopathology
symptoms once a patient has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and also in schizophrenia drug trials, a widely used measure of symptom severity, and
to track treatment response (Gopalakrishnan et al., 2020). The PANSS can be helpful in that it is used to identify the presence and severity of
psychopathology symptoms in schizophrenic patients. It has high internal reliability and validity in both positive and negative symptoms, and in short-
and long-term trials, an excellent sensitivity to change (Gopalakrishnan et al., 2020). According to Sadock et al. (2014), in assessing clinical outcomes in
treatment studies of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, the PANSS has become the standard tool and is easy to administer reliably and
sensitive to change with treatment.
References
Aboraya, A., Nasrallah, H., Muvvala, S., El-Missiry, A., Mansour, H., Hill, C., Elswick, D., &
Price, E. (2016). The standard for clinicians’ interview in psychiatry (skip): A clinician-
administered tool with categorical, dimensional, and numeric output—conceptual
development, design, and description of the scip. Innovations in clinical neuroscience,
13(5-6), 31–77. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5077257/
Gopalakrishnan, M., Farchione, T., Mathis, M., Zhu, H., Mehta, M., Uppoor, R., & Younis, I.
(2020). Shortened positive and negative symptom scale as an alternate clinical endpoint
for acute schizophrenia trials: Analysis from the us food & drug administration.
Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, 3(1), 38–45.
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.prcp.20200003
Sadock, B. J., Sadock, V. A., & Pedro, R. M. (2014). Kaplan and sadock’s synopsis of
psychiatry: Behavioral sciences/clinical psychiatry (Eleventh ed.). LWW.