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).