CIDI training

The University of Michigan's CIDI Training and Reference Center (www.umich.edu) offers a CIDI training workshop each summer in conjunction with courses in survey methods. This workshop provides training in the use of the World Mental Health Composite International Diagnostic Interview (WMH-CIDI). The course is appropriate for principal investigators who plan to use the CIDI in research projects, study managers who will be in charge of implementing research projects, data analysts who will be working with data generated from CIDI studies, and interviewers.

The workshop addresses issues in data collection, editing, coding and data cleaning and provides hands-on experience in the administration of the WMH-CIDI. It includes a set of home-study interactive CDs and three days of classroom training in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) and paper and pencil (PAPI) modes are included in the training.

Three members from IDRAAC: Aimee Karam Ph.D, John Fayyad MD, and Zeina Mneimneh MPH were recently certified as regional trainers for the Arabic World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health-CIDI (WMH-CIDI) and IDRAAC has become a regional Training and Resource Center for the Arabic CIDI. Training sessions on the use of the Arabic WMH-CIDI are now offered by IDRAAC. These training sessions last between 3-5 days at the end of which trainees will be able to administer the WMH-CIDI (PAPI) form, have access to its data entry program, diagnostic algorithms to generate DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnoses as well as restricted web pages of the WMH-CIDI instrument.

For more information on the content, dates, training fees, please contact us at idraac@idraac.org attention Aimee Karam,PhD, John Fayyad, MD, Zeina Mneimneh,PhD.
IDRAAC has conducted 3 training sessions on the Arabic CIDI to 3 groups of researchers from the Arab World.

The first training session took place from February 27th till March 3rd, 2006 in Beirut, Lebanon. IDRAAC trained 20 mental health workers from UNRWA, Palestine (West Bank and Gaza).


The second training session took place from April 30th to May 3rd, 2006 in Amman Jordan.
IDRAAC trained 54 mental health professionals affiliated with the Ministry of Health, Baghdad, Iraq.

The third training session took place from August  19th  till August 21st  2008 in Beirut, Lebanon. IDRAAC trained a team of Jordanian mental health psychiatrists affiliated with the Ministry of Health in Jordan.

The WMH-CIDI is a lay administered psychiatric diagnostic interview that generates diagnoses according to the definitions and criteria of both ICD and DSM. It is a comprehensive, fully structured diagnostic interview that assesses a wide range of lifetime and mental health disorders (depression, mania, panic disorder, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, substance use problems, post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, psychosis, gambling, eating disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,….), as well as other chronic medical conditions (diabetes, stroke, heart problems, hypertension, cancer,…). Moreover, it gathers information on disability and quality of life, utilization of services, use of medications and a number of different risk factors including (family history, childhood experiences, social life, marital life, employment history, religious beliefs and commitments, war exposure and displacement).