The Personality Disorder Examination: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

There are unanswered questions about the reliability and validity of some of the personality disorders in DSM-III. There has been a need for a structured interview that would facilitate the pursuit of these and other issues of interest to clinicians and research investigators. The Personality Disorder Examination (PDE) was developed to systematically survey the phenomenology and life experiences relevant to the diagnosis of all of the personality disorders in DSM-III. It provides suspected Axis II diagnoses and dimensional scores for every subject on each disorder. The interrater reliability of the PDE proved to be excellent in a preliminary study of 60 patients.