An Investigation on Effectiveness of Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test in Diagnosis of Visual-Spatial Disorganizations among Selected Psychotic Patients

Abstract

Screening patients for psychotic features can pose a problem when using verbal based tests. Establishment of validity of non-verbal psychotic screening scale can enhance diagnostic specificity and address challenges associated with verbal based tests. The goal of this study is to check whether Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test-II will serve as a diagnostic specific tool for distinguishing between psychotic patients and healthy population. A total of 40 participants 22 males and 18 females were employed in the study. They were made of 10 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, another 10 with depressions associated with psychotic features, 10 with substance/medication induced disorders and 10 healthy adults as the control. Their ages ranged from 20 - 65 with a mean age of 35.70 and standard deviation of 6.04. The healthy control group was staff of the hospital that was comparable to the patients in terms of age, gender and studies. All participants available who met the inclusive criteria who were willing to participate were selected. The instruments were (BVMGT-II) and (WHODAS 2.0). The design of the study was between group designs and One Way ANOVA was employed for data analysis. The findings of the study showed that BVMGT-II discriminated between patients with psychotic disorder and healthy population. It is recommended that BVMGT-II should be employed as screening instrument by the clinical/neuropsychologists in clinical psychological assessment for distinguishing psychotic patients from healthy population.