I am looking for evidence describing the 'accuracy' or 'validity' of self-reported mental health problems in comparison to a clinical diagnosis - for example, if you ask people in a survey if they have a mental health problem, to what extent does this correlate with whether or not they would be diagnosed with this problem by a health professional? Any suggestions welcome
An interview can be as biased as a self-report. The weaknesses with self-reports are explaind in our paper: El Boghdady M, Ewalds-Kvist BM, Duffy K, Hassane A, Kouli O, Ward B, Yap B-H, Crawford A, Chai C-S, Lim J-Y, Makhdoom N. Medical students’ specialty preference relative to trait emotional intelligence and general self-efficacy. Education in Medicine Journal. 2020;12(2):23–35. https://doi.org/10.21315/eimj2020.12.2.3
"potential limitations consist of self-ratings, although self-ratings are recommended for assessments of personality traits, we must speculate about the students’ self-knowledge, because it is known that 12% of medical students show over-confidence and 8.3% demonstrating under-confidence in realistic knowledge.
S. Béatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist many thanks for your quick reply - and an interesting article :)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10711906/
Conclusions: Weak agreement at the level of diagnosis continues to threaten the credibility of estimates of prevalence of specific disorders. A bias toward underreporting, as well as stronger agreement at the level of the depression syndrome and on ordinal measures of depressive symptoms, suggests that associations with risk factors are conservative.
(Citation from link).
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20531120/
Despite the statistical agreement between the self-report inventories and physician diagnosis, the coherence among these measures was less than optimal. Use of self report tools is recommended to complement physician understanding of patient symptom description and management of anxiety
(Citation from link).
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Article Comparison of symptom-based versus self-reported diagnostic ...
Highlights
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Symptom-based and self-reported diagnoses are commonly used remote diagnostic measures.
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Agreement between the methods was high for any anxiety and MDD cases.
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Self-reported diagnoses categorised most participants with anxiety as having GAD.
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Symptom-based diagnoses had a more even distribution across the anxiety disorders.
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Further validation of these methods against clinical interviews is needed to guide selection.
(Citation from link).
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https://thehumancondition.com/self-report-measures-for-mental-health/
Self-report tools give your mental health professional a more personal look at how you feel about your condition and the effects it has on your life. As your clinician gets to know you better, they will be able to understand the way you, specifically, view these questions and answers when combined with the other clinical tools that they use. This allows your therapist to provide you the most individualized treatment possible.
(Citation from link).
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Imo, the last citation is good practical advice,
i..e. to fine-tune clinical and self-reporting tools to validate better treatment for healing.
Stephen I. Ternyik thank you very much for this comprehensive response - yes this is the evidence I was looking for, much appreciated!
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