This book has grown out of a previous publication, the Mini-compendium
(Bech et al. 1986), which was developed as a guide both for clinical
research and for the documentation of routine activities in assessing
psychiatric disability, whether in a general hospital, by a district
psychiatrist or a nurse, by a liaison-consultant psy- chiatrist, by a
clinical psychologist, by a health worker, or in general practice. One
of its outstanding merits was that its scales were authoritative: During
its prepara- tion Max Hamilton corrected and finally accepted the
English versions of his scales and Ole Rafaelsen corrected the English
versions of the remaining scales. While preparing this publication we
were constantly reminded of how difficult it is to accept that Max and
Ole are no longer with us. _ One indication of the success of the
Mini-compendium is the fact that it was ttanslated into a number of
languages, including Spanish (Ballus and Tressera, 1988), Italian (Fava
and Grandi, 1988), French (pichot et al. 1989), Dutch (D'haenen and
Verhoeven, 1989), and German (Maier et al. 1991). Another indi- cation
was its correspondence to the DSM-III (APA, 1980) criteria for anxiety,
depression, mania and schizophrenia. This volume refers to DSM-III-R
(APA, 1987) and ICD-IO (WHO, 1992).