Psychiatric morbidity and treatment pathway outcomes of patients presenting to specialist NHS psychodynamic psychotherapy services: results from a multi-centre study.

Objective: Little is known about socio-demographic, diagnostic, and clinical characteristics of patients referred for assessment to psychodynamic psychotherapy services. The aim of this study was to remedy this by prospectively collecting comprehensive and systematic demographic and clinical information on a large number of patients referred to NHS psychodynamic psychotherapy services.

Design: Fourteen psychotherapy services operating within a National Health Service joined the study and contributed data for 1,136 patients referred from primary and secondary care clinics.

Psychometric validation of the State Scale of Dissociation (SSD).

Although dissociative phenomena are often transient features of mental states, existing measures of dissociation are designed to measure enduring traits. A new present-state self-report measure, sensitive to changes in dissociative states, was therefore developed and psychometrically validated. Fifty-six items were formulated to measure state features, and sorted according to seven subscales: derealization, depersonalization, identity confusion, identity alteration, conversion, amnesia and hypermnesia.