How false are "false" positive psychotic symptoms?

Abstract

Recent population-based studies showed that self-reported positive symptoms of psychosis strongly predict the development of psychotic disorder in both the short and the long term (Hanssen et al., 2002 and Poulton, R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T.E., Cannon, M., Murray, R. and Harrington, H., 2000. Children's self-reported psychotic symptoms and adult schizophreniform disorder: a 15-year longitudinal study. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 57, pp. 1053–1058. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (201)Poulton et al., 2000). Such findings seemingly contradict the conventional wisdom that the use of diagnostic assessment scales that essentially rely on self-report (Eaton et al., 2000) is problematic because they generate “false” positives (Andrews, 2000; Brugha et al., 2001 and Cooper et al., 1998). We compared the epidemiological value of false versus true positive self-reports of psychosis in a 3-year follow-up of a large general population sample.