A Discriminant Rule for Screening Cases of Diverse Diagnostic Types. Preliminary Results

To assess the prevalence of specific types of mental disorders in the general community it is desirable on grounds of both economy and validity of classification to employ a two-stage strategy. The first stage would be a screening questionnaire administered by nonclinicians, and the second stage would be a detailed diagnostic assessment by a clinician. In this report, a first-stage screening rule is developed to identify persons with one of four diverse disorders in Israel: schizophrenia, affective disorders, nonaffective neurotic disorders, and antisocial personality. The screen employs the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Interview (Dohrenwend, Shrout, Egri, & Mendelsohn, 1980). Logistic regression is used as the discriminant function model. The sample used to develop the discriminant rule consisted of four groups of patients from institutions and a selected group of Jerusalem residents judged to be well by mental health professionals.