Psychiatric rating scales

Abstract A wide array of psychiatric rating scales have been developed and refined over the past 50 years to provide reliable and objective assessments of the symptom severity of a large number of psychiatric disorders. Although primarily used to assess changes in illness severity during treatment trials (i.e., as dependent measures in randomized controlled trials), psychiatric rating scales also may be used as relatively brief screening tools for diagnosis and as useful tools in nonresearch settings to monitor illness activity and response to treatment within disease management or measurement-based care paradigms. In this chapter, we briefly review the development and psychometric characteristics of some of the most widely used psychiatric rating scales for depression, mania, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and dementia, as well as several of the common conditions in children and adolescents.