Darrel Edwards

The Prediction of Marijuana Use from Personality Scales.

DRUG abuse, once viewed solely as a chronic problem of poor minority groups, ghetto neighborhoods, or of alien cultural groups, has grown to epidemic proportions through our society. Extreme concern has been expressed a t many levels of national life, including The White House, and illicit drug use has become a significant area of medical, social, and psychological research. The literature on drug abuse has failed thus far to describe clearly the personalities of individuals who engage in the use of illegal drugs. Without implying causal relationships, marijuana use is often seen as the first step in drug involvement and perhaps can be regarded as part of the initiation rites for intensive drug experience. I n any case, investigators agree that marijuana use is highly correlated with other drug abuse (Kaplan, 1971). Implicit in most popular conceptions of the drug user are the notions that these persons typically reject the standards and values of parents, schools, and traditional authorities and that drug use is an expression of rebellion against prevailing social standards.

Status Congruency and Mental Health

This study evaluated a status-congruency model in relationship to effective military performance after psychiatric contact and compared the status-congruency score distributions for psychiatric outpatients with those for non-psychiatric controls. The congruency scores contributed uniquely to the prediction of post-outpatient-contact performance, accounting for a significant amount of the criterion variance beyond a linear combination of its components. The outpatients who were congruent or who exhibited accelerated promotions were more effective than their underachieving, outpatient peers. Score distribution comparisons indicated that the outpatient-contact group had fewer accelerated achievers and more negatively incongruent members than non-psychiatric controls.

Personality and attitudinal change for alcoholics treated at the Navy's Alcohol Rehabilitation Center

424 men diagnosed as alcoholic who entered a Navy Alcohol Rehabilitation Center (ARC) for treatment during FY 1973 were studied to determine any personality changes measured by the MMPI and Comrey Personality Scales during treatment for alcoholism. Trust, emotional stability, and extroversion increased during treatment. Anxiety, depression, somatic complaints, and impulsivity decreased. Eighty percent of the men received good to excellent reports from work after release from treatment. Overall, the results indicate a positive process in the treatment of alcoholism in an ocupational setting.

Encoding and Decoding of Connected Discourse During Altered States of Consciousness

The following hypotheses were investigated in a study of memory recall and an altered state of consciousness: (a) A direct relationship was expected between the magnitude of correct responses and task complexity. (b) Semantic context variation was expected to cause greater impairment in verbal processing than variation in syntactic constraints. (c) Under N2O fewer correct responses in verbal processing were expected to be made. Forty-four volunteers, male corpsmen in the U. S. Navy between the ages of 20 and 29, were randomly divided into two equal groups: a nitrous oxide group and an air group. After breathing either N2O or air for 10 minutes, Ss were required to repeat pairs of taped sentences of high syntax/high semantic context to low syntax/low semantic context. Responses were scored for errors. All three hypotheses were accepted. Task complexity caused the greatest magnitude of errors. Ss were able to compensate for variations in syntax and in the gas state, but low semantic quality strongly affected performance. The factors interacted in powerful ways to produce differential response errors from a low error rate for air/high syntax/high context to a high error rate for N2O/low syntax/low context.

Positive results from outpatient mental health intervention.

Collected data on 3,342 outpatients over 2 years. A 4-year follow-up of successful outcomes was conducted on each of the cases. Hospitalized patients showed a 30% success rate. The success rate for the group that was recommended for no treatment was 60%. The success rate for patients who completed outpatient treatment increased to 78%. A patients expectation of outcome, the clinicians assessment of reason for referral, the diagnosis, and age were the most powerful predictors of success. These findings demonstrate the following: (a) procedures for assessment and intervention can be successful; and (b) a significant portion of the population can be served by intervention with proper selection.

A Consideration of the State of the Art of Diagnosis in Real Clinical Settings

Summary If diagnosis is to be of value to the clinician the classes must be both functional and different. An examination of diagnosis for 2824 Navy enlisted men who were hospitalized for psychiatric reasons was made. The results showed the following: (a) Diagnosis does reflect clinical decisions manifested by different dispositions for different major classes. (b) The classes were not defined by standard family histories, disciplinary and job histories, past medical histories, attitudes, or standard demographic information. (c) The categories do define distinct factors as used by psychiatry in one industrial setting—the Navy. (d) these results would lead to a Feighner et al. (4) conclusion that the nomenclature is meaningful and can function usefully in a setting in which real defined outcomes are being decided. (e) Studies arguing against the use of diagnostic nomenclature may have some points to make, but their results are limited. Perhaps many experimentally structured tests of the nomenclature have n...

Empirical Validation of Diagnostic Similarities from a Structural Perspective

In an effort to establish definitive patterns of patient variables for the diagnostic categories used by psychiatry, this study investigated the similarity between diagnostic classes as perceived by psychiatrists when evaluating patients from their own caseloads. A grid method was used to evaluate the diagnostic process. Thirteen psychiatrists rated their own patients on the constructs generated from their own personal dimensions. An overall analysis of the data demonstrated that patients within a diagnostic category were seen as more similar to one another than were patients from different diagnostic categories. Similarities between diagnostic classes showed that neurotic/situational maladjustment, personality disorder/alcoholic, and psychotic/alcoholic were the most similar pairs of unlike diagnoses. Examination of the process of diagnosis showed the functional similarity between some diagnostic classes. Specific areas of diagnostic similarity were present in a system that produced overall diagnostic clarity. Implications for the use of the grid method in psychiatric training were discussed.

The relationships among professional performance ratings, clinical decisions, and clinical outcomes in psychiatry.

Summary When training backgrounds, ratings, and clinical practices among Navy psychiatrists were considered, a definite profile between rated competence and performance emerged. Doctors rated as highly competent were generally older and had more experience since training than did doctors with low-rated competence. High ratings were associated also with the ability of doctors to manage patients with relatively few drugs and few physical restraints. With respect to differences in management or major diagnostic groups, it appeared that ratings reflected agreement between clinical practices and administrative policies. Generally, it is assumed that fewer clinical hours and decisions should affect the character and behavior disorder group as compared with other diagnostic categories. High competence ratings were characteristic of doctors who followed this dictum. Although posthospital outcomes were not significantly related to ratings in the small samples of this study, a trend in this direction was evident. R...