Measures
Our main instrument was a semi-structured interview, which included
items on demographics, use of general and mental health services,
COVID-19 experience, worsening of symptoms, emergence of new symptoms,
and severity of illness (patient’s global impression-PGI and clinician’s
global impression-CGI) (Guy, 1976). Clinical data from the patient
records (primary and secondary ICD-10 diagnoses, clinic visit data,
illness duration) were also extracted. At the time of data collection,
there were no established measures in Turkish to assess COVID-19 related
anxiety; therefore, we developed an 8-item scale with 4-choice Likert
response set to assess that. A general question “How much
anxiety/distress did the following cause during the pandemic?” was
followed by eight specific questions, such as: “acquiring the virus”,
“passing it on to my close ones”, etc. coded as “none, a little,
moderately, very much”. The internal consistency (alpha) of the 8 items
was .83.