A Note on the Clinical Utility of the Wildman Symptom Checklist

The Wildman Symptom Checklist (WSC) is a sixty-item self-administered inventory of physical and mental “symptoms” and life-style variables (Wildman & Wildman, 1999).Half of the “symptoms” are bogus in terms of never being observed among genuine psychiatric patients, and 10 of the lifestyle reports are unrealistically virtuous. An individual’s score on the WSC is the total of the bogus “symptoms” plus the number of unrealistic lifestyle behaviors endorsed. Therefore, total scores on the WSC can range from 0 to 30. Although this brief instrument has been used previously in simulation research (eg, Merckelbach, Smeets & Jelicic, 2009), this report contains the first data relating to the WSC from a “clinical sample,” to the best of the authors’ knowledge.