The SRQ (Self-Reporting Questionnaire) is a psychiatric screening tool that originally included 30 questions. The Brazilian version of SRQ-20 (a version that includes the 20 items for non-psychotic mental disorders) was validated in the early 1980s. The objective of the present study was to validate the Brazilian version of SRQ-20 and the 5 items for alcohol-related disorders as compared to the SCID-IV-TR (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR) as the gold standard. The study was conducted in Santa Cruz do Sul, a small town in southern Brazil, with 485 subjects (54.8% females, mean age 40.04 years). The 5 items for alcohol-related disorders showed low sensitivity (66%). The optimum cutoff value for SRQ-20 was 7/8, with 86.33% sensitivity and 89.31% specificity. The discriminant power of SRQ-20 for psychiatric screening was 0.9, and Cronbach's alpha was 0.86.