Mental Status Schedule

Abstract

Problem THE DEVELOPMENT of adequate criterion measures for identifying cases of mental disorder to which social and cultural factors can then be related is a continuing and crucial methodological problem. The Mental Status Schedule, a relatively new instrument, was constructed to improve the research value of clinical judgments based on data collected during a psychiatric interview. Two of the authors have reported on this instrument's reliability and validity.¹³ This paper describes the use of this instrument to detect differences in the amount and kind of psychopathology in a sample of urban New York and rural Kentucky hospitalized schizophrenics. A future paper will examine what social-cultural factors may be related to observed differences between the two groups. Mental Status Schedule The Mental Status Schedule (MSS) contains an interview schedule and a matching inventory of 248 dichotomous items descriptive of small units of pathological behavior (see Table