Screening for personality disorder: a comparison of personality disorder assessment by patient and informants.
The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders (SCID-II Version 2.0) is becoming the most favoured instrument to measure personality disorder but takes up to an hour to complete. The Standardized Assessment of Personality (SAP), an informant-based measure, takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Both instruments have been validated independently. This study aimed to determine whether the SAP is a suitable screening instrument for personality disorder as measured by the SCID-II. Fifty-seven psychiatric patients were assessed for personality disorder using both the SAP and the SCID-II. The SAP assessments were conducted blind to the results of the SCID-II assessments. Agreement between the two instruments in this population was low (kappa = 0.3). The level of agreement differed between personality disorder categories, ranging from kappa = 0.4 (antisocial) to 0.1 (narcissistic). In this population of patients, the SAP proved to be a poor screen for the SCID-II. The study highlights the discrepancy between informant and self-report assessments for personality disorder.
Walters
Paul
P
Health Services Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK. spoapaw@iop.kcl.ac.uk
Moran
Paul
P
Choudhury
Partha
P
Lee
Tennyson
T
Mann
Anthony
A
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods*; D015588:Observer Variation; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*