Development and Initial Validation of the Structured Interview for Self-Destructive Behaviors

This article describes the initial validation of the Structured Interview for Self-Destructive Behaviors (SI-SDB), a brief interview assessing suicidality, self-injury, substance abuse, disordered eating, and risky sexual behaviors. Self-destructive behaviors present clinical and practical challenges for mental health treatment providers. Participants were 217 psychiatric inpatients with a wide variety of diagnoses who completed the SI-SDB and other measures of psychiatric symptoms, trauma exposure, and other childhood experiences. Internal validity analyses revealed an internally consistent measure with 2 major factors. External validity analyses indicated that the Substance Abuse and Disordered Eating scales were predictive of related psychiatric diagnoses. All scales except Substance Abuse were significantly correlated with psychiatric symptoms and childhood abuse. These findings indicate that the SI-SDB is a valid means of assessing 5 significant domains of dangerous behaviors in clinical and research settings. Further research on the reliability of reports over time, interrater consistency, and convergent validity with longer measures of the SI-SDB domains is needed.