Measure of Serious Psychological Distress

In analyses of the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), serious psychological distress (SPD) was measured using the K6 screening instrument for nonspecific psychological distress (Furukawa, Kessler, Slade, & Andrews, 2003; Kessler et al., 2003; OAS, 2005c). In previous NSDUH reports, the K6 scale was referred to as a measure of serious mental illness (SMI), but this was changed in 2004 (see Appendix A for overall methodology for the State report and Appendix A: Section A.7 for a brief discussion of the mental health measure as well as the References in the full report).

In the 2003 NSDUH, the SMI module consisted of a broad array of mental health questions that preceded the K6 items. In the 2004 NSDUH, the sample of respondents aged 18 or older was split evenly between the "long-form" module used in the 2003 NSDUH and a "short-form" module consisting only of the K6 items. Results from the 2004 NSDUH showed that large differences in SPD prevalence rates occurred between the two modules, especially in the 18 to 25 age group (see Office of Applied Studies [OAS], 2005c, Appendix B, Section B.4.4).

The 2004 national SPD estimates were based only on data from the long-form module. However, in this report, the 2004 short-form scores have been adjusted to the long-form scores in order to make use of the entire 2004 sample. These data have been pooled with the 2003 long-form data to produce the SPD estimates in this report. For details on how this adjusted measure of SPD was created, see Aldworth, Chromy, Foster, Heller, and Novak (2005). This pooled measure is hereinafter referred to as SPD.

This page was last updated on June 03, 2008.

SAMHSA, an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, is the Federal Government's lead agency for improving the quality and availability of substance abuse prevention, addiction treatment, and mental health services in the United States.