To aid general practitioners and other non-psychiatrists in the better recognition of mental illness short scales measuring anxiety and depression were derived by latent trait analysis from a standardised psychiatric research interview. Designed to be used by non-psychiatrists, they provide dimensional measures of the severity of each disorder. The full set of nine questions need be administered only if there are positive answers to the first four. When assessed against the full set of 60 questions contained in the psychiatric assessment schedule they had a specificity of 91% and a sensitivity of 86%.The scales would be used by non-psychiatrists in clinical investigations and possibly also by medical students to familiarise them with the common forms of psychiatric illness, which are often unrecognised in general medical settings.

SYNOPSISIt is generally recognized that social relationships occupy a central position in psychiatry. To examine the role of social relationships in the onset of minor psychiatric morbidity it is necessary to construct an instrument which will meet the need for a valid, reliable and comprehensive index of social relationships. Such an instrument has now been developed and used in a sample of the general population.The Interview Schedule for Social Interaction arose from a research need, and was constructed to assess the availability and perceived adequacy for any individual of a number of facets of social relationships. These consist both of persons and of the provisions obtained through them. Data from a general population sample suggest this instrument to be sufficiently valid and reliable, and also sensitive to predictable variations between sociodemographic groups, to justify its use in clinical and epidemiological studies, both in psychiatry and general medicine.

We propose a new scoring for Goldberg's (1972) General Health Questionnaire. We argue that the response 'no more than usual', to an item describing pathology, should be treated as an indicator of chronic illness rather than of good health, and we score these responses accordingly. We give evidence that this set of responses is associated with other measures of neurotic illness, and that the revised scoring provides a better prediction of caseness than the conventional scoring. The revised scoring is more strongly associated with trait neuroticism, and is more stable in repeated measurement. It is recommended in preference to the conventional scoring for most research and epidemiological purposes.

SynopsisThis study uses methods of latent trait analysis to examine the relationships between psychiatric symptoms that constitute the common psychiatric disorders encountered in primary-care settings. Two highly correlated symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression are shown to underlie these disorders. Neurovegetative sysmptoms of depression are shown to be on the same dimension as psychic symptoms of depression, but to represent a more severe manifestation of depression.