Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN): introduction to WV's mental health community.

The Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) is a semi-structured clinical interview used by trained clinicians to assess and diagnose psychiatric disorders among adults. The SCAN core is the Present State Examination (PSE) which has been developed and tested globally during the past four decades with good validity and reliability. The SCAN was developed within the framework of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Joint Project on Diagnosis and Classification of Mental Disorders, Alcohol and Related Problems (1). The use of the SCAN gives the flexibility to diagnose mental disorders based on the current International Classification of Disease (ICD), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) systems or other diagnostic systems that may develop in the future. A major purpose of the SCAN is to allow comparisons of psychiatric diagnoses to be made across the world.