The first application of rating scales in psychiatry goes back to soon after the First World War, but the real development did not occur until after the Second World War. Their use has increased so much that it is scarcely possible to look through any copy of a general psychiatric journal without finding at least one paper which involves the use of a scale of some sort. Such papers are always c...

A significant proportion of patients worldwide diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) experience comorbid psychiatric conditions, depression being the most prevalent disorder among them. In Western countries, prevalence mental disorders IBS ranges between 40% and 60%. However, in Asian such as India, rates are even higher, exceeding 80% individuals IBS. The disease is mostly studied regi...

UNLABELLED Schizophrenic patients have a high rate of smoking and cognitive deficits which may be related to a decreased number or responsiveness of nicotinic receptors in their brains. Varenicline is a partial nicotinic agonist which is effective as an antismoking drug in cigarette smokers, although concerns have been raised about potential psychiatric side-effects. We conducted a double-blind...

BACKGROUND The Bipolar Disorder Patients Follow-up (BDPF) project is a longitudinal, prospective and naturalistic study. The purpose of the present report is to introduce the project, elaborate its methods, and present the reliability data of the utilized symptoms rating scales. METHODS The sampling started in May 2008 and is still in progress. The probands are assessed at the beginning of th...

BACKGROUND The influence of ethnicity on different aspects of psychiatric hospitalization is far from clear. THE AIM OF THE STUDY The main aim of the study was to compare the Arab and the Jewish inpatients, at the time of admission, for the demographic factors, severity of psychotic, and affective psychopathology and comorbid drug abuse rate. POPULATION, METHOD, AND TOOLS: Among 250 consecuti...

The authors explicated the validity of the Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS; D. Watson et al., 2007) in 2 samples (306 college students and 605 psychiatric patients). The IDAS scales showed strong convergent validity in relation to parallel interview-based scores on the Clinician Rating version of the IDAS; the mean convergent correlations were .51 and .62 in the student and p...

premenstrual syndrome is a common disorder experienced by up to 50% of women during reproductive age. the prevalence of severe form of pms (pmdd) is 3% to 8 %. psychiatric disorders in pms patients have resulted in significant morbidity and in some cases caused resistance to the treatment process.390 participants (264 with pms/pmdd, and 126 healthy students of university of guilan) who complete...

The purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of EFL learners in an academic writing task. Two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing ins...

After an earlier study into the practical aspects of the management of perinatal death, a counselling service was introduced for parents whose baby had died in the perinatal period. The service was monitored, and the parents who received the service were compared with a group that did not. Fifty families were allocated randomly either to the counselling (supported) group or to the contrast grou...

A life event inventory has been used to compare forty obsessive compulsive neurosis patients with equal number of non-psychiatric normal controls which were matched in terms of age, sex and, economic status. Ratings by the obsessionals of the degree of happiness or distress produced by their life experiences revealed that obsessionals have significantly greater mean distress rating i.e., higher...