Cultural considerations using the structured clinical interview for DSM-III for mood and anxiety disorders assessment

This paper focuses on the impact that culture has upon standardized or structured interviews. It briefly reviews how these interviews evolved from a primary research function, what they can teach us about clinical work, and the multiple ways that culture influences these supposedly objective instruments and the diagnoses which follow from their use. Although the use of structured interviews and standardized diagnostic criteria has been a major advance for the field in terms of reliability, care needs to be exercised when evaluating individuals from disparate cultural backgrounds.