The Psychiatry Scales Textbook describes the development and psychometric properties of the Standard for Clinicians’ Interview in Psychiatry (SCIP), an assessment tool that includes 18 clinician-administered (CA) scales, 15 self-administered (SA) scales, and 8 research versions. Together, these 41 scales assess most domains of adult psychopathology, including generalized anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessions, compulsions, posttraumatic stress, depression, mania, hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thoughts, aggression, negative symptoms, alcohol use, drug use, anorexia, binge eating, bulimia, attention deficit, and hyperactivity.  All SCIP scales follow a simple and universal set of rules which allows clinicians and researchers can use them across multiple psychiatric diagnoses, making SCIP a truly transdiagnostic assessment tool. The primary audience for the textbook includes psychiatrists, psychiatry residents, clinical psychologists, therapists, clinical social workers, counselors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, other mental health professionals, and researchers. These professionals can use the SCIP scales as a measurement-based care (MBC) tool in clinical practice, research studies, and clinical trials.

Chapter 7 of the textbook presents a comprehensive measurement-based care (MBC) curriculum for mental health professionals, educators, and researchers. Curriculum materials, including PowerPoint presentations and videotaped interviews, are available through the textbook. Clinicians and educators are permitted to use and adapt the MBC curriculum and PowerPoint presentations, in English or other languages, for training future mental health providers. This permission is granted without expiration.

Using a Machine Translation with Post-Editing (MTPE) approach, the SCIP scales are now available in six major languages: Arabic, English, Farsi, Hindi, Mandarin, and Spanish. Together, these languages are spoken by more than four billion people worldwide. The availability of SCIP in multiple languages enables researchers and clinicians to conduct international multicenter studies, collect data across diverse populations, and perform cross cultural analyses. Ultimately, the SCIP scales have the potential to serve as standardized psychiatric assessment tools for populations around the world. Future goals include translating the SCIP scales into additional languages and publishing new editions of the Psychiatry Scales Textbook.

Dr. Ahmed Sayed Aboraya, MD, DrPH, currently holds the position of Chief of Psychiatry at William R. Sharpe Jr. Hospital. He also serves as a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine in Lewisburg, West Virginia (WV), and as adjunct faculty in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University (WVU) in Morgantown, WV. Dr. Aboraya obtained his medical degree (MD) from Cairo University and pursued further education with a Master of Public Health (MPH) and a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) from Johns Hopkins University. After completing his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins in 1991, he finished his psychiatry residency at WVU in 1995. Since then, he has remained on faculty with WVU while practicing as an attending psychiatrist at Sharpe Hospital.

Dr. Aboraya specializes in treating chronic mental illnesses such as schizophrenia spectrum disorders and mood disorders, accumulating over 30 years of experience in West Virginia. His primary research focus centers on the clinical assessment of psychopathology. Notably, he developed the Standard for Clinicians’ Interview in Psychiatry (SCIP) as an assessment tool for adult psychiatric disorders. The SCIP, administered by clinicians and researchers, underwent testing between 2000 and 2020 in an international multisite study spanning three countries: the USA, Canada, and Egypt, with a total sample size of 1,064 subjects. The SCIP has proven to be a reliable and valid assessment tool, with results from the SCIP project published and presented at numerous national and international conferences.