Mental health symptoms in partial epilepsy.

We evaluated the potential clinical value of the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) as a multidimensional self-report measure to identify the expected higher rates of clinically significant mental health symptoms in adults with partial/complex partial epilepsy (PE), as compared to a representative sample of adult non-patients. As expected, adults with PE had significantly higher rates of elevated SCL-90-R scale scores than did adult non-patients. The SCL-90-R may serve as both a screening measure to identify patients who could benefit from further mental health services as well as a measure of clinical response to epilepsy- and mental health-related interventions.