Is There a Short-Cut? An Investigation Into the Life Event Interview

42 men and 53 women patients at the Edinburgh Regional Poisoning Treatment Center were interviewed, usually within 8-12h of admission. The interview covered life events and difficulties from 6 months before admission. For 43 patients it was in 3 stages: 1) a list of life events and difficulties to be ticked, 2) standard probing questions about each situation ticked, 3)free flowing unstructured interviewing eliciting fuller contextual data about the situations.