I C Puerta1. 1. Grupo de Neuropsicología y Conducta, Universidad de San Buenaventura, Medellín, Colombia. icpuerta@epm.net.co
Abstract
AIMS: This review considers, from a theoretical clinical point of view, several interview based instruments used in the areas of neuropsychology, psychology and psychiatry that have been designed to evaluate the associated symptoms in several diagnostic categories or types in the different editions of the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. DEVELOPMENT: The study of psychopathology, especially in children and adolescents, has one prior requisite: a thorough knowledge of how categorical disorders are organised by axes and the reason for the groups of symptoms and their variations located in each criterion. Consequently, in order to perform a diagnosis in child psychopathology, different criteria have to be fulfilled, according to the presence of the different disorders associated with a particular pathology, and the different evaluation tools provide a multiple approach that allows the behavioural problems to be evaluated. CONCLUSIONS: We currently have a series of diagnostic instruments available that are recommended for individual clinical study and can be applied both by parents and by teachers. The need then arises to research into whether the symptoms reported by parents and teachers have similar characteristics or whether, to the contrary, there are differences in the behaviour observed in distinct contexts, which would require a further analysis of the contextual particularities the patient moves in.
AIMS: This review considers, from a theoretical clinical point of view, several interview based instruments used in the areas of neuropsychology, psychology and psychiatry that have been designed to evaluate the associated symptoms in several diagnostic categories or types in the different editions of the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. DEVELOPMENT: The study of psychopathology, especially in children and adolescents, has one prior requisite: a thorough knowledge of how categorical disorders are organised by axes and the reason for the groups of symptoms and their variations located in each criterion. Consequently, in order to perform a diagnosis in child psychopathology, different criteria have to be fulfilled, according to the presence of the different disorders associated with a particular pathology, and the different evaluation tools provide a multiple approach that allows the behavioural problems to be evaluated. CONCLUSIONS: We currently have a series of diagnostic instruments available that are recommended for individual clinical study and can be applied both by parents and by teachers. The need then arises to research into whether the symptoms reported by parents and teachers have similar characteristics or whether, to the contrary, there are differences in the behaviour observed in distinct contexts, which would require a further analysis of the contextual particularities the patient moves in.