The Psychiatric Interview

This chapter deals with psychiatric interview as a means of assessing the patient and developing an initial treatment plan in clinical situations. Psychiatric interviews are analogous to the history and physical examination in a general medical assessment; they systematically survey subjective and objective aspects of illness, and generate a differential diagnosis and plan for further evaluation and treatment. The style and content of a psychiatric interview are necessarily shaped by the interviewer's theory of psychopathology. The written psychiatric database is an orderly exposition of information gathered in the interview, presented in a relatively fixed format. The database components discussed in the chapter are identifying data, chief complaint, history of the present illness, past psychiatric history, past medical history, family history, and personal history. The chapter also talks about general features of psychiatric interviews.