Improving Major Depressive Episode Assessment: A New Tool Developed by Formal Psychological Assessment

Frontiers in Psychology

Francesca Serra¹ 

关键词: major depressive episode;    questionnaire;    formal psychological assessment;    symptomatology;    psychopathology;    quantitative-qualitative evaluation;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00214

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Aim: Major depressive episode (MDE) can manifest with different features. Discriminating between different types of MDEs is crucial for proper treatment. The aim of this study is to propose a new tool for MDE assessment in bipolar disorder (BD) or major depressive disorder (MDD) to overcome some limitations of current rating scales. The proposed tool investigates all of the clinical features of different MDEs and gives qualitative information, differentiating patients with the same score but different symptoms and psychopathology severity. To achieve this purpose authors used a new methodology called Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA). FPA allows creating relations between the items of an assessment tool, and the set of diagnostic criteria of a given clinical disorder. In the application at hand, given the capability to analyze all clinical features, FPA appears a useful way to highlight and differentiate between inhibited and agitated depressive symptoms.

【 授权许可】

CC BY