Clinicians' Judgments of Mental Health: A Proposed Scale

Abstract

Introduction and Aims The concept of "mental health" has become current in the everyday thinking of clinicians despite its global and diversely defined character. The members of the Psychotherapy Research Project of The Menninger Foundation wanted to know whether this concept had enough tangibility and unity of reference to be reliably judged along a single continuum by experienced observers. The vast literature does not deal extensively with this apparently simple question. Most contributors have worked on problems of definition (e.g., Senn,20Mayman15), although a small but expanding number of attempts have been made to measure specific criteria of health Lorr,10Rogers and Dymond,18Jahoda,8Kelman and Parloff,9Parloff17).* We came to this question in the early phases of the Psychotherapy Research Project26when a need was felt for a simple survey instrument to record shorthand judgments of