You might think of it as every psychologist’s dream – to write a study called My Grandmother’s Personality: A Posthumous Evaluation. Frederick Coolidge, of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has achieved that dream. His paper appears in the July 1999 issue of the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology.
Professor Coolidge used a diagnostic tool of his own invention, called the Coolidge Axis II Inventory. Its main purpose? “To assess clinical syndromes [listed in] the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia and other psychopathological syndromes.” …
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.