A fast online questionnaire for screening mental illness symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Published in: Translational psychiatry Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 311 - 6
• Main Authors: Chen, Fang, Yan, Weizheng, Calhoun, Vince D., Yu, Linzhen, Chen, Lili, Hao, Xiaoyi, Zheng, Leilei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 04.08.2022; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/477/2811; 692/53/2423; 692/699/476; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Psychology; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Depression - diagnosis; Depression - epidemiology; Humans; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental disorders; Mental Disorders - diagnosis; Mental Disorders - epidemiology; Neurosciences; Pandemics; Pharmacotherapy; Psychiatry; Questionnaires; Reproducibility of Results; Surveys and Questionnaires; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2158-3188; 2158-3188
• DOI: 10.1038/s41398-022-02086-7

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive effects on the situation of public mental health. A fast online questionnaire for screening and evaluating mental symptoms is urgent. In this work, we developed a new 19-item self-assessment Fast Screen Questionnaire for Mental Illness Symptoms (FSQ-MIS) to quickly identify mental illness symptoms. The FSQ-MIS was validated on a total of 3828 young adult mental disorder patients and 984 healthy controls. We applied principal component analysis (PCA), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and general log-linear analysis (GLA) to evaluate the construct and parallel validity. Results demonstrate that the proposed FSQ-MIS shows high test-retest reliability (0.852) and split-half reliability (0.844). Six factors obtained using PCA explained 54.3% of the variance and showed high correlations with other widely used scales. The ROC results (0.716–0.983) revealed high criterion validity of FSQ-MIS. GLA demonstrated the advantage of FSQ-MIS in predicting anxiety and depression prevalence in COVID-19, supporting the efficiency of FSQ-MIS as a tool for research and clinical practice.