Life stress and psychiatric clinic referral

A "life stress" scale is applied to the antecedent events motivating 179 patients to seek outpatient psychiatric help. Intake evaluation reports of patients who kept their appointments at the Adult Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic of Vanderbilt University Hospital over a three-month period were reviewed. Almost half of the consecutive new patients indicated that a marriage-related or family-related problem had led them to seek an appointment at the clinic. "Life stress" scales, particularly those developed by Holmes and Rahe and by Paykel, invariably rank undesirable marital and family life events as having high stressful impact. Previous studies have examined life events antecedent to various medical and psychiatric illness, but not the events motivating a patient to seek psychiatric help.