DC-MMS: Diagnostic Checklist of Major Depression, Mania and Schizophrenia

Abstract

The present study was designed to develop a Computer Software for computer based diagnosis of schizophrenia, mania, and patients having major depression on the basis of their nonverbal communicative patterns. The study was conducted into two phases. The first phase consisted of (a), recording videos of non verbal communicative patterns of patients in order to assign behavioural patterns to each on the basis of observations of recorded videos by a panel of three clinical psychologists named as Aware Group and (b), defining of those patterns (for each disorder) by practitioners called the Unaware Group as they were unknown to the behaviors posed by the patients recorded in the videos, in order to verify the assigned patterns by the Aware Group. The second phase comprised of developing the diagnostic software and its validation on the basis of obtained information. Results revealed that non-verbal behavioural patterns associated with each disorder are significant tools that can be used as differential diagnostic criteria by the clinicians. The findings concluded that nonverbal behavioural cues can reliably be used for diagnosing different mental disorders with an accuracy of 97%, 100%, and 97% for Schizophrenia, Major Depression, and Mania, respectively.