Differentiating psychiatrically disturbed children on the basis of a structured interview.

A structured psychiatric interview designed for both clinical assessment and data collection was given to 50 pairs of well-matched pediatric and psychiatric clinic children and their mothers. The two groups were shown to be clearly distinguished on the basis of numbers of symptoms. Behavior and school symptoms gave the sharpest distinction between the two groups. Neurotic and somatic symptoms were the poorest discriminators. The psychiatric children showed significantly more antisocial symptoms than their matched pediatric peers. Age differences showed the expected trends with the widest divergence in the number of symptoms being in the oldest age group.