colleagues’ responses

colleagues’ responses

Assignment:

Read a selection of your colleagues’ responses.

Respond to at least two of your colleagues by comparing your assessment tool to theirs. APA Format with at least two references in each responses no more than five years old

Response Post #1

Main Post – Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale

Week 2 Discussion – Assessment and Diagnosis in Psychotherapy

Main Post

Assessment Tools

It is paramount as health care professionals to be skillful in assessing clients to be able to diagnose, plan, and produce optimal care yielding full or partial recovery of the clients. Various assessment and measuring tools are available for mental health providers to help measure illness, diagnose clients, and measure a client’s response to treatment that will help supplement data obtained from the clinical interview. Though assessments usually span the entire treatment cycle, a thoughtfully constructed initial intake meeting can be a great tool to establish and reinforce the required therapeutic alliances between client and therapist, provide reassurance, ease anxiety, and enhance information gathering process required for an accurate diagnosis and suitable treatment plan (Wheeler, 2014).

Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale

The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) was developed in the sixties. It is still one of the most popular behavioral rating scales/instruments use today by clinicians to quickly gather information about the possible presence and severity of various psychiatric symptoms and to assess changes in symptoms in response to medications (Zanello et al., 2013). Originally, the BPRS was a 16-item scale, it was later extended to the standard 18-item version and currently expanded to a 24-item scale to measure additional aspects of schizophrenia symptoms thereby increasing its sensitivity to psychotic and affective disorders and to be used for patients living in the community (Shafer et al., 2017).