[Construction and preliminary validation of an anxiety scale, the FARD (Ferreri anxiety rating diagram)].

The complexity of the anxious disease does not facilitate the clinical approach. That the reason why the authors have developed a rating scale based on a descriptive symptomatology to find out a diagnosis, to rate the severity of illness and to facilitate the pharmaceutical prescription. To develop a skill needed by general practitioners as well as specialists, Prof. M. Ferreri worked with pools of medical doctors to isolate the more frequent items in the anxious symptomatology. So they pointed out a first group of 14 items. A first statistical approach was to compare the new scale with the well-known Hamilton anxiety scale by the way of a sample of 81 ratings. After a first factor analysis, a sub-group of 12 items were definitely retained. These items were split in 4 factors which permitted to present the factorial results in diagram [Acta psychiat. belg., 87, 704-713 (1987)].