Development of the Illness Perception Questionnaire Mental Health.
BACKGROUND
It has been suggested that illness perceptions in mental health are related to treatment outcomes.


OBJECTIVE
We aimed to develop a short generic questionnaire to assess clients' problem perceptions in mental health, congruent with the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ) for somatic health.


METHODS
We adapted the IPQ-R (Moss-Morris, R., Weinman, J., Petrie, K.J., Horne, R., Cameron, L.D., & Buick, D. ( 2002 ). Psychology and Health, 17, 1-16) to psychological complaints, in particular the IPQ-R's scales that assess clients' perceptions of what their problem actually is and what its causes are. We administered our adapted instrument, the IPQ-MH, to large groups of mental health clients, and subsequently performed psychometric analyses over the scores.


RESULTS
The identity scale of the IPQ-MH differentiates different clients; the structure scale of the IPQ-MH replicates that of the original IPQ-R; the cause scale reliably measures clients' attributions of causes to their mental problems.


CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that our IPQ-MH can reliably assess clients' mental health problem perceptions.
Witteman
Cilia
C
Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. c.witteman@socsci.ru.nl
Bolks
Lisabeth
L
Hutschemaekers
Giel
G
D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D008603:Mental Health; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012649:Self Concept; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*