Using Questionnaires to Screen for Psychiatric Disorders: A Comment on a Study of Screening for Bipolar Disorder in the Community

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In a recent issue of this journal, Hirschfeld and colleagues¹ reported the results of a large epidemiologic study (more than 85,000 participants) of bipolar disorderb ased on the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ), a self-administered screening scale for mania/hypomania. The article followed the publication of 2 other reports describing the diagnostic properties of the MDQ in psychiatric patients and a subset of the subjects in the epidemiologic study.^2,3