The American journal of psychiatry
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Comparative Study
Prevalence of dissociative disorders in psychiatric outpatients.
The purpose of the study was to assess the prevalence of DSM-IV dissociative disorders in an inner-city outpatient psychiatric population. ⋯ Dissociative disorders were highly prevalent in this clinical population and typically had not been previously diagnosed clinically. The high prevalence of dissociative disorders found in this study may be related to methodological factors (all patients were offered an interview rather than only those who had scored high on a screening self-report measure) and epidemiological factors (extremely high prevalence rates for childhood physical and sexual abuse were present in the overall study population).