Measurement in Psychiatry

Abstract

Progress in science depends upon the fertility of inspiration, the acuteness of observation, and the accuracy of instruments to measure those observations. It is with respect to the last of these that progress in psychiatry has lagged. Instruments in plenty have been devised, many have been acclaimed and some accepted as a standard against which the other measures are judged; some have even come to be used as a definition of the disorder to be measured, the achievement of a certain score indicating that the disorder is present.