ABSTRACT
The advent of the descriptive diagnostic system of DSM-III, biological psychiatry, and managed health care have conspired to produce a decline of third-party support for the use of formal psychological tests as routine diagnostic procedures in mental health. Descriptive diagnosis and the symptom focus of biological treatments eliminated the need for complex tests to identify covert and highly abstract psychic processes, as had previously been required in the diagnosis of such disorders as schizophrenia and neurosis. It is paradoxical that the same psychiatric and managed care forces that voiced initial concern about maintaining reliable and valid diagnostic data have consistently preferred the use of subjective and unreliable unstructured clinical interviews to gather this data over empirically established, reliable, and valid psychological tests. The virtual exclusion of formal tests from routinely approved intake procedures underlines the signal failure of psychological assessment to establish itself as a meaningful contributor to treatment planning.
