The Reliability of Psychiatric Assessment: An Analysis

This study arose out of another enquiry currently in progress (Sainsbury and Grad) into the relative merits of community and hospital care of the mentally sick as practised in the Chichester and District Mental Health Service. For this purpose it was clearly important to know how reliable were the psychiatric assessments made on patients referred to the Service. The occasion was seized to carry out a detailed investigation into the reliability of diagnosis and other psychiatric assessments under N.H.S. conditions, with particular reference to why disagreement between psychiatrists sometimes occurs. As described elsewhere (Carse, 1958; Morrissey and Sainsbury, 1959), the Service supplies all the psychiatric requirements of Chichester and district, and thus provides a wide range of patients treated in a variety of settings.