Abstract
The Structured Psychiatric Interview is intended for use in surveys of population subgroups defined in terms of nonpsychiatric criteria including, for example, general medical patients. Its purpose is to elicit evidence of current mental pathology, utilizing the essential clinical skills of the examiner within the context of a structured situation. No diagnostic inferences are made at this stage. (Such inferences would be both inappropriate and unwise without additional information about the individual subject.) Unlike some existing structured interviews, it does not purport to be a “psychological test for psychopathology,” thus avoiding questionable assumptions about the propriety of summating molecular behaviors to arrive at a “quantitative evaluation of the individual for psychopathology.” Insofar as it represents an organized phenomenological examination, it will be of value in the individual case, but it remains primarily an epidemiological instrument for economic measurements of mental disorder within and between populations.
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