One hundred fifty-five (77%) of 201 participants recruited in a trial of intensive vs standard case management of patients with recurrent psychotic illness had their personality status measured before treatment and were followed up for two years. The primary outcome was the total number of days spent in psychiatric hospitalisation in the two years following randomisation. Thirty-three (21%) of the patients had a personality disorder and their duration of hospital stay (105 days) was greater than in those without personality disorder (56 days). There was weak evidence that intensive case management more effective in reducing the duration of care in those with personality disorder than in those without personality disorder.

Assessing personality disorders (PD) remains a difficult task because of persistent problems linked to concurrent validity of existing instruments, which are all structured interviews or self-report inventories. It has been advocated that indirect methods, projective techniques in particular, can strengthen PD assessment methods. The thematic apperception test (TAT) may be a significant adjuvant method of PD assessment.

Personality disorders are frequently associated with socially unacceptable behaviours that might not be always considered deviant. On the other hand, envy has been linked with various forms of maladjustment such as interpersonal conflicts, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, and even criminal behaviour such as vandalism and even murder. According to the DSM-IV, none of the personality disorders, except the narcissistic personality, is formally associated with envy. Nevertheless, this ‘deadly sin’ is so omnipresent in human relationships that it cannot be restricted only to the narcissistic personalities. Most scholars recognise that people would deny that they envy someone else since envy is socially considered as highly undesirable; verbal reports are expected to be biased. To circumvent this difficulty, a projective questionnaire is proposed. We constructed two questionnaires: a direct version (DV) and an indirect version (IV). The sample consisted of 786 students from high school and university. Results suggest that the indirect version provides a more accurate assessment of envy.

This prospective study provided a direct comparison of French and American samples concerning a cognitive diathesis for depression. Using the Experience Sampling Method and identical measures across sites, subjects were signaled five times daily by electronic devices to provide in vivo reports of negative events, attributions, and depressed moods. After controlling for effects associating clinical and demographic variables, and despite differences attributable to national origin, attributional style emerged as a highly significant predictor of the numerous specific attributions made to negative events within the course of daily life. However, consistent with the cognitive mediation hypothesis, attributional style did not directly explain depression levels. The results are discussed in terms of the predictive power of cognitive and personality assessments in understanding the day-to-day experience of depression.