Manual for the Standard for Clinicians’ Interview in Psychiatry (SCIP)

Book excerpt: The SCIP manual will introduce a new assessment tool designed to be compatible with 21st century advances in measurement-base care (MBC) and personalized medicine in psychiatry (PMP). The SCIP includes 18 clinician-administered and 15 self-administered reliable and validated scales covering most adult symptom domains: anxiety, obsessions, compulsions, posttraumatic stress, depression, mania, delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thoughts, aggression, negative symptoms, alcohol use, drug use, attention deficit/hyperactivity, and eating disorders. Mental health professionals (psychiatrists, psychiatry residents, psychologists, therapists, clinical social workers, counselors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, professors, students, and mental health researchers) are the primary audience of the manual. These professionals will be able to implement SCIP scales in their practice and use the SCIP psychopathology glossary as part of the emerging science of personalized medicine psychiatry (PMP). Existing books on measures and rating scales, such as the two books above, describe different scales developed by different authors at different periods. Each scale has its own rating guidelines and training requirements, which must be followed by clinicians in order to use the scales. This demands a considerable amount of time for clinicians and can be a barrier to using the scales in practice. Even within the same psychopathology domain, many published measurement scales exist. For instance, the book published by Waters and Stephane includes 120 scales for psychosis. Among the 120 scales for psychosis, which scale(s) should the clinician choose? Our proposed manual will remove these barriers by creating simple and universal principles which allow readers to use the 33 reliable and validated SCIP scales with most adult psychiatric disorders. There will be 15 videotaped interviews available online for readers who buy the book. Readers are expected to watch the interviews in conjunction with reading the manual.