Overview
The Composite International Diagnostic Interview is a comprehensive, fully standardised interview that can be used to assess mental disorders according to the definitions and criteria of ICD-10 and DSM-IV. It was developed as a collaborative project between the World Health Organisation and the US National Institutes of Health. It is the most widely used structured diagnostic interview in the world.
The CIDI has been designed for use in a variety of cultures and settings. It is primarily intended for use as an epidemiological tool, but can be used for other research and clinical tasks. The CIDI has been used in major epidemiological surveys in the US and Australia. A revised version, CIDI 3.0 is being used by the World Mental Health Surveys.
The success of the CIDI rests on a number of grounds:
- The interview is modular and covers somatoform disorders, anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, mania, schizophrenia, eating disorders, cognitive impairment, and substance use disorders.
- The interview is very highly structured, complex in its decision rules yet it can be administered reliably by trained interviewers who are not clinicians.
- The computerised scoring algorithm gives diagnoses according to DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnoses.
- There are regional CIDI training centres throughout the world that sell the interview and offer training.
Each centre operates on a not-for-profit basis supported by the sales of the CIDI products.
Version 1.0 was released in 1990, Version 1.1 was released in 1993, Version 2.1 in 1997 and Version 3 in 2004. Version 2.1 is in two forms: lifetime and 12-month. The reliability of the CIDI has been demonstrated in a major international field trial of the instrument (1, 2) and in other studies (3). The validity of the CIDI has also been established (3, 4,5).
Cidi-Auto 2.1:
A Computerised Composite International Diagnostic Interview
The WHO Training and Reference Centre for CIDI, Sydney, has produced a computerised CIDI, known as CIDI-Auto. CIDI-Auto 2.1 can be self-administered or interviewer-administered. The validity of CIDI-Auto 1.0 has been established (4), and the reliability and validity of CIDI-Auto 2.1 is being assessed. The principal advantages of the computerised version are increased reliability of administration and significant reduction in staff time required to administer the interview and to enter and score the data.
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