ABSTRACT
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is in part a neuropsychiatric illness. Therefore, the behavioral, cognitive, and executive outcomes of TBI come under the purview of the neuropsychiatric examination. The history-taking following TBI is much more complicated than the history-taking following the onset of a depression or classical psychiatric disorders. The clinician should ask about phenomena that do not appear in many manuals of psychopathology, psychiatry, or psychopharmacology (Ovsiew 2013). It is noteworthy that neither the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association 2000) nor the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013) has a comprehensive taxonomy for neuropsychiatric disorders. There is a paucity of most neuropsychiatric disorders in these texts and a dearth of quality descriptors in areas such as neurodevelopmental disorders or neurocognitive disorders. The difference between a good neuropsychiatric examination and a mediocre one is the taking of a good history, which must include an informant clinical interview and information from previous medical treatments and examinations. A “poor historian” is the description of someone who takes a poor history, rather than one who gives it (David 2009).
