ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the prevalence and clinical relevance of psychotic experiences in children and adolescents and describes a number of interview and questionnaire instruments that used to assess these symptoms. In young children, such experiences may be developmentally appropriate and not necessarily indicate underlying pathology. As children age into adolescence, however, psychotic experiences become increasingly predictive of psychopathology and, in particular, multimorbid psychopathology, characterized by the presence of multiple disorders, poor global functioning and suicidality. The chapter provides a suggested approach to systematically assessing for psychotic experiences. Psychotic experiences have increasingly been viewed as existing on a number of continua-notably a continuum of psychotic conviction or reality testing. Psychotic experiences divided into frank symptoms and attenuated symptoms, with the latter being more common. The limitation of most instruments, however, is that they provide little guidance in terms of assessing the details of such experiences.
