The Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN) is a family of evidence-based instruments used to assist clinicians with diagnosis, placement, and treatment planning.
[1] The GAIN was developed to respond to the needs of substance abuse treatment personnel who are faced with the demands of assessing, documenting, treating, and monitoring clients.
Researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and behavioral healthcare agencies worked to design assessment tools that could produce methodical data for mapping onto the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for diagnosis and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Patient Placement Criteria for placement, while following The Joint Commission (TJC) [formerly the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO)] for integrating assessments into treatment plans.
[9] As biopsychosocial assessments, The GAIN-I and GAIN-SS provide measures over four main categories of emotional and behavioral health problems—internalizing, externalizing, substance, and crime/violence.
The GAIN-I includes ratings at the end of each section that allow an interviewer to record whether a participant seemed to be doing some estimating, whether they did not understand the questions, whether they were in denial about the severity of a problem or whether they were misrepresenting information.