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The PSC-17 can help primary care providers assess the likelihood of finding any mental
health disorder in their patient. The brief and easy to score PSC-17 has fairly good mental
health screening characteristics, even when compared with much longer instruments like the
CBCL (Child Behavior Checklist by T. Achenbach).
A 2007 study in primary care offices compared use of the PSC-17 to simultaneous use of the
CBCL in 269 children aged 8-15, showing reasonably good performance of its three
subscales compared to similar subscales on the CBCL. The gold standard here was a K-
SADS diagnosis, which is a standardized psychiatric interview diagnosis. These comparison
statistics are summarized below, with positive and negative predictive values shown based
on different presumed prevalence (5 or 15%) of the disorders. Providers should notice that
despite its good performance relative to longer such measures, it is not a foolproof diagnostic
aide. For instance the sensitivity for this scale only ranges from 31% to 73% depending on
the disorder in this study:
W Gardner, A Lucas, DJ Kolko, JV Campo “Comparison of the PSC-17 and Alternative Mental Health Screens in
an At-Risk Primary Care Sample” JAACAP 46:5, May 2007, 611-618
PSC-17 Internalizing score positive if ≥ 5
PSC-17 Externalizing score positive if ≥ 7
PSC-17 Attention score positive if ≥7
PSC-17 Total score positive if ≥15
“Attention” diagnoses can include: ADHD, ADD
“Internalizing” diagnoses can include: Any anxiety or mood disorder
“Externalizing” diagnoses can include: Conduct disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder,
adjustment disorder with disturbed conduct or mixed disturbed mood and conduct
PSC-17 Scoring
K-SADS Screen
Sensitiv-
ity
Specific-
ity
PPV
5%
PPV
15%
NPV 5%
NPV
15%
ADHD
PSC-17 Attention
0.58 0.91 0.25 0.53 0.98 0.92
CBCL Attention 0.68 0.90 0.26 0.55 0.98 0.94
Anxiety
PSC-17 Internalizing 0.52 0.74 0.10 0.26 0.97 0.90
CBCL Internalizing 0.42 0.88 0.13 0.38 0.97 0.90
Depression
PSC-17 Internalizing 0.73 0.74 0.13 0.33 0.98 0.94
CBCL Internalizing 0.58 0.87 0.19 0.44 0.98 0.92
Externalizing
PSC-17 Externalizing 0.62 0.89 0.23 0.50 0.98 0.93
CBCL Externalizing 0.46 0.95 0.33 0.62 0.97 0.91
PSC-17 Total 0.42 0.86 0.14 0.35 0.97 0.89
CBCL Total
0.31 0.96 0.29 0.58 0.96 0.89
Any Diagnosis