• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.178-185
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• 1999

Objective：This study was designed to examine the validity of the Ego Impairment Index(EII) in adolescent psychiatric patients(depression, depressive-conduct disorder, schizophrenia), and to explore the validity of the depressive-conduct disorder as a diagnostic entity. Method：19 depressives, 13 depressive-conduct disordered, and 10 schizophrenics with the age from 12 to 18 were selected based on DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria, and their responses of the Rorschach and MMPI were analyzed. The EII was empirically developed by Perry and Viglione(1991) in order to assess the degree of ego impairment, and was derived from the Rorschach test. Results：It was founded that a single factor, ego impairment, was derived from the principal component analysis and explained 57.18% of total variances. The degree of ego impairment was grater in schizophrenics than in the other two groups, but there were no difference between depressives and depressive-conducts. Conclusions：These results offered support for the use EII as an empirical means of assessing the degree of ego impairment in adolescent patients. And these results suggest that depressive-conduct disorder group is more similar to the depressive group, implying that depressive-conduct disorder might correspond to so called masked depression. The clinical implication and limitation of present study were discussed.