The Iowa Personality Disorder Screen: Development and preliminary validation of a brief screening interview

The length and expense of comprehensive personality disorder interviews mak es them unwieldy for routine use, A brief but sensitive screen could elimin ate administration of longer instruments in many instances. We describe the development of the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen (IPDS)-a mini-structur ed interview which can be completed in less than 5 minutes, Retrospective a nalyses using 1,203 SIDP-R interviews suggested that the IPDS items should provide good sensitivity and specificity. We present results from a prospec tive validation study, using a mixed group of 52 nonpsychotic inpatients an d outpatients who were diagnosed using the SIDP-IV. Blind administration of the IPDS yielded excellent sensitivity (92%) and good specificity (79%), u sing a subset of five screening items, Addition of two more items leads to an estimated sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 86%. The IPDS shows prom ise as a quick personality disorder screen for use in research settings or standard clinical interviews.