 My name is Sam Dutton and I am the author of Malignan's Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. The MMPI, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, composed by Hathaway as a psychologist and McKinley, a physician, is the outcome of decades of research into personality disorders. The revised version, the MMPI-2, was published in 1989 but was received cautiously. MMPI-2 changed the scoring method and sum of the normative data. It was therefore hard to compare MMPI-2 to its much hallowed and often validated predecessor. The MMPI-2 is made of 567 binary, true or false, items, questions. Each item requires the subject to respond, this is true or false, as applied to me. There are no correct answers. The test booklet allows the diagnostician to provide a rough assessment of the patient, the basic scales, based on the first 370 queries. It is recommended though to administer all 567 items in order to reach a much better-founded diagnosis. Based on numerous studies, the items are arranged in scales. The responses are compared to answers provided by control subjects. The scales allow the diagnostician to identify traits and mental health problems based on these comparisons. In other words, there are no answers that are typical to a paranoid or narcissistic or an anti-social patient. They are only responses that deviate from an overall statistical pattern and conform to the reaction patterns of other patients with similar scores. The nature of the deviation determines the patient's traits and tendencies but not his or her diagnosis. The interpreted outcomes of the MMPI-2 are phrased this way. The test results play subject X in this group of patients who, statistically speaking, reacted similarly. The test results also get said subject X apart from these groups of people who, statistically speaking, reacted or responded differently to subject X. The test results would never say subject X suffers from this or that mental health problem. There are three validity scales and ten clinical ones in the original MMPI-2, but other scholars derived hundreds of additional scales. For instance, to help in diagnosing personality disorders, most diagnosticians use either the MMPI-1 with the Mori-Wall-Bashfield scales in conjunction with the Wiggins' content scales or, more rarely, the MMPI-2 updated to include the Colligan-Mori Offeral Scales. The validity scales indicate whether the patient responded truthfully and accurately or was trying to manipulate the test. They pick up patterns. Some patients want to appear normal. Some patients want to appear abnormal and consistently choose what they believe are the correct answers to reflect their choices, and this kind of behavior triggers the validity scales. These are so sensitive that they can indicate whether the subject lost peace or her place on the answer sheet and was responding right away. The validity scales also alert the diagnostician to problems in reading comprehension and other inconsistencies in response patterns of the subject. The clinical scales are dimensional, though not multi-phasic as the test misleading name implied. The clinical scales measure hypochondriacids, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviation, masculinity, femininity, paranoia, psychistemia, schizophrenia, hypomania, and social introversion. They also scale for alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a variety of personality disorders. The interpretation of the MMPI-2 is now fully computerized. The computer is fed with the patient's sex, age, educational level, and marital status, and does the rest. Still, many scholars have criticized the scoring of the MMPI-2, and it is a hotly debated issue.