Measured the efficacy of two approaches to teaching master's of social work students to assess clients for substance abuse: an alcohol and other drug (AOD) minor program and integration of AOD content into core courses. Student self-reports suggested that while the minor program was most successful, courses with integrated AOD content did…

Although self-directed learning is a common response for many of the 232,090 US men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, very little is known about the nature of the experience for them. Four themes emerged from interviews with 12 prostate cancer patients describing their self-education efforts in regard to their disease. A…

Some evidence suggests that research and service clinics differ on treatment-relevant dimensions, but no study has examined whether research clinics (RCs) themselves differ. We compared 2 samples of children and adolescents (ages 7 to 17 years) with anxiety disorders treated in 2 different university-based child anxiety RCs, one in Philadelphia (n…

Background: Population and service characteristics were compared for youth (age 0-18 years) with and without schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, who received public mental health services in Hawaii's comprehensive system of care between July 1, 2000 and June 30, 2001. Methods: Electronic records of youth with a diagnosis in the…

Objective: To investigate children selected from a community sample for showing extreme autistic-like traits and to assess the degree to which these individual traits--social impairments (SIs), communication impairments (CIs), and restricted repetitive behaviors and interests (RRBIs)--are caused by genes and environments, whether all of them are…

This study compared the three scales of the WISC and the WISC-R for degree of intercorrelation. Results included significant correlations in all cases, no systematic changes in variance, and significantly lower IQs on the WISC-R for all children in the sample, except the EMRs. (Author)

Compared child outpatients with diagnoses for both conduct disorder (CD) and attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADD/H) with children with CD but no ADD/H. Children with both CD and ADD/H exhibited more physical aggression and a greater variety and severity of antisocial behaviors despite their younger age at time of referral than did…

In a survey of pre-clinical students' views on being told their diagnosis and prognosis in the hypothetical case of cancer, high agreement in the proportion wanting to be or not to be told was found between the responses of students and a sample of cancer patients reported by Kelly and Friesen. (Author/LBH)

Analyzes and compares diagnoses made over a five-year period to determine whether differences between diagnoses of students and those of specialists justified further verification by specialized staff, and whether the proportion of such differences had changed with time because of more effective teaching. (WM)

Three groups of kindergarten-age children referred for hyperactivity, who varied with regard to symptom pervasiveness, were compared with each other and with a group of normal controls on a variety of biological, psychological, and behavioral variables. Direct observation, rather than biological and psychological test data, most clearly…

Results of this study revealed that physicians and psychiatrists were equal and significantly better in recognizing suicide than the other groups. They were followed by psychologists, social workers, ministers, and college students, in that order. (Author/BEF)

Administered several psychiatric inventories to 30 cystic fibrosis and 30 matched control children and their parents. Data analysis revealed few differences in either psychopathological symptoms or psychiatric diagnoses between groups. Differences were either physical in nature or did not depart enough from normal scores to merit label of high…

This paper compared clinicians' diagnosis and DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), DSM-III-R (Revised), and ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) diagnoses of 52 individuals with autism and 62 nonautistic, developmentally disordered individuals. The DSM-III-R system overdiagnosed the presence of autism, and ICD-10 closely…

The diagnostic accuracy of nonadjusted and bootstrapped diagnosis was compared using a sample of 1,455 psychiatric patients who completed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. The usefulness of bootstrapping depended on the criteria for accuracy. Conditions under which bootstrapping might increase diagnostic accuracy are detailed. (SLD)

Objective: To investigate abnormalities in the structural integrity of brain white matter as suggested by diffusion tensor imaging in adolescents with early-onset schizophrenia (onset of psychosis by age 18). Method: Twenty-six patients with schizophrenia and 34 age- and gender-matched healthy volunteers received diffusion tensor imaging and…