Faculty Articles

Measuring Money Mismanagement among Dually Diagnosed Clients

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2008

Publication Title

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

Volume

196

Issue/Number

7

First Page

576

ISSN

0022-3018

Last Page

579

Abstract/Excerpt

Clients dually diagnosed with psychiatric and substance abuse disorders may be adversely affected if they mismanage their Social Security or public support benefits. Assistance managing funds, including assignment of a representative payee, is available but there are no objective assessments of money mismanagement. In this study, a Structured Clinical Interview for Money Mismanagement was administered twice at 1-week intervals to 46 clients receiving disability payments and was compared with clinician's judgment that the client was incapable of managing funds, the frequent basis for payee assignment by the Social Security Administration and Veterans Affairs. Clinician's judgment and structured interview were concordant on 71% of capability judgments. The interview had high test-retest reliability and was correlated with self-reported money mismanagement and global assessment of functioning scale scores, but clinician judgment was not associated with these measures. Results suggest that the interview is sensitive in detecting money mismanagement and raises questions concerning the validity of clinicians' judgments.

DOI

10.1097/NMD.0b013e31817d0535

Peer Reviewed

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