The polydiagnostic interview: a structured interview for the polydiagnostic classification of psychiatric patients.

A structured interview (PODI) for the polydiagnostic evaluation of affective and schizophrenic disorders is presented. The interview includes elements of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III (SCID) and of the Present State Examination (PSE). The central idea of this interview is to break down complex criteria into their elements, to assess a wide area of such elements, and to recombine them by a computer program according to different algorithms that are included in a greater number of operational diagnoses. Reliability data will be presented which show sufficiently high kappa and Yule coefficients for a selected set of diagnostic criteria for depressive, manic and psychotic disorders. The applicability of the PODI was established in about 180 interviews.