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The Psychiatric Interview: Methodological and Practical Aspects

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The Psychiatric Interview for Differential Diagnosis

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Abstract

Becoming a skilled psychiatric diagnostic interviewer requires years of effort. The study of the basic science of psychopathology and clinical training are essentials. The interview can be conducted with different degrees of structure: fully structured, free style (fully unstructured), and semi-structured. We examine each methodological approach and the theories behind them, and we present results from empirical studies. We argue that the standardized, fully structured psychopathological diagnostic interview does not seem to be an epistemologically adequate or valid way of allocating psychiatric diagnoses. We recommend that a semi-structured, conversational, and phenomenologically oriented interview should be used for eliciting psychodiagnostic information. Further, we recommend that empathy, here understood as the strong intention to comprehend the patient’s experiences and experiential framework, must permeate the entire interview.

We provide practical suggestions useful in the interview and give examples of situations in which the patient’s psychopathology complicates the interview and offer advice on how to take this into account when interviewing.

This chapter draws upon the papers:

Nordgaard J, Revsbech R, Saebye D, Parnas J (2012) Assessing the diagnostic validity of a structured psychiatric interview in a first-admission hospital sample. World psychiatry: official journal of the World Psychiatric Association 11 (3):181–185

Nordgaard J, Sass LA, Parnas J (2013) The psychiatric interview: validity, structure, and subjectivity. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience 263 (4):353–364. doi:10.1007/s00406-012-0366-z

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mental Health Center Hvidovre, University Hospital of Copenhagen, Broenby, Denmark

    Lennart Jansson

  2. Early Psychosis Intervention Center Region Zealand & Institute for Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Broenby, Denmark

    Julie Nordgaard

Authors
  1. Lennart Jansson
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  2. Julie Nordgaard
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Jansson, L., Nordgaard, J. (2016). The Psychiatric Interview: Methodological and Practical Aspects. In: The Psychiatric Interview for Differential Diagnosis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33249-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33249-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33249-9

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