Assessment of insight in psychosis:: a re-standardization of a new scale

Over the last decade, a number of tools have been developed to evaluate, in a systematic way, patients' insight into their psychotic illness. Such tools, however, capture different clinical phenomena of insight. So far, there is no indication as to which phenomenon of insight might be the most useful or predictive (e.g. clinically or therapeutically) to assess. This article reports the re-standardization of a revised self-administered insight scale in patients with psychosis. first published in 1992. It is meant to capture views held by individuals suffering from psychosis about changes occurring within themselves and in their environment. The scale was administered to 64 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia but with a range of symptoms and in different stages of their illnesses. This new version is simpler to use and score than the original instrument and shows good reliability, internal consistency and concurrent validity. This study forms the preliminary basis for future work examining the phenomenon of insight, its relationship to clinical variables and its predictive validity in terms of patients' behaviours and prognoses. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.