Abstract
Brief mental health disorder screening questionnaires (SQs) are used by psychiatrists, physicians, researchers, psychologists, and other mental health professionals and may provide an efficient method to guide clinicians to query symptom areas requiring further assessment. For example, annual screening has been used to help identify military personnel who may need help. Nearly half (44.5%) of Canadian public safety personnel (PSP) screen positive for one or more mental health disorder(s); as such, regular mental health screenings for PSP may be a valuable way to support mental health. The following review was conducted to (1) identify existing brief mental health disorder SQs; (2) review empirical evidence of the validity of identified SQs; (3) identify SQs validated within PSP populations; and (4) recommend appropriately validated brief screening questionnaires for five common mental health disorders (i.e., generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), major depressive depression (MDD), panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, alcohol use disorder). After reviewing the psychometric properties of the identified brief screening questionnaires, we recommend the following four brief screening tools for use with PSP: the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (screening for MDD and GAD), the Brief Panic Disorder Symptom Screen—Self-Report, the Short-Form Posttraumatic Checklist-5, and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-Consumption.
Highlights
The focus was on identifying validated questionnaires that screen for one or more mental disorders identified as prominent for public safety personnel (PSP) [1] using the lowest possible number of items (e.g., Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4), which includes two items related to major depressive disorder and two items related to generalized anxiety disorder, rather than the PHQ-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale 7 (GAD-7))
The 4-item version with a cut-off score of 9 is recommended for Veterans Affairs (VA) substance use disorders (SUDs) samples [82]
The diagnostic accuracy, symptom severity, and symptom profiling available from general or military population data may not generalize to PSP because of their vocational experiences [4,96,97,98]
Summary
Five mental health disorder symptom profiles were the most concerning, as rates surpassed those found in the general Canadian population: symptoms of alcohol use disorder (5.9% of PSP screened positive), anxiety (18.6% of PSP screened positive), depression (26.4% of PSP screened positive), panic disorder (8.9% of PSP screened positive), and posttraumatic stress disorder (23.2% of PSP screened positive) [1]. Such high rates of mental health disorder symptoms in PSP could be related to their frequent exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTE) as part of their job duties [4]
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