A brief inpatient measure of global psychiatric symptom severity: initial validation of the Brief Symptom Measure-25 for an adolescent inpatient sample.

Adolescent psychiatry is experiencing a growing need for brief yet psychometrically robust outcome measures for inpatient settings. Outcome measures currently available present limitations to clinicians and patients alike in terms of their excessive length, time of completion, difficulty to score, and focus on specific clusters of symptoms. The present study sought to validate the Brief Symptom Measure-25 (BSM-25) as a brief and easily administered measure of global psychiatric symptom severity in adolescent inpatient samples. This study evaluated the results from 154 adolescent inpatients who completed several self-report measures at admission. The findings demonstrate that the instrument has good construct validity when compared with validated measures of psychological health and well-being, behavioral problems, and interpersonal distress. We also showed the sensitivity to change of the BSM-25 from admission to discharge, and we showed that this healthy change was paralleled in several measures (self-reports and clinician ratings), using data from 75 adolescent psychiatric inpatients who were assessed at admission and also at discharge. Although this is only the first step in the validation of this measure for an adolescent inpatient setting, the BSM-25 shows promise as a brief outcome measure of global psychiatric symptom severity while maintaining validity and instrument sensitivity.