The Beck Depression Inventory, created by Aaron T. Beck, is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory, one of the most widely used psychometric tests for measuring the severity of depression. Its development marked a shift among mental health professionals, who had until then, viewed depression from a psychodynamic perspective, instead of it being rooted in the patient's own thoughts.
The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), also called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), sometimes also abbreviated as HAM-D, is a multiple-item questionnaire used to provide an indication of depression, and as a guide to evaluate recovery. Max Hamilton originally published the scale in 1960 and revised it in 1966, 1967, 1969, and 1980. The questionnaire is designed for adults and is used to rate the severity of their depression by probing mood, feelings of guilt, suicide ideation, insomnia, agitation or retardation, anxiety, weight loss, and somatic symptoms.
Suicide risk assessment is a process of estimating the likelihood for a person to attempt or die by suicide. The goal of a thorough risk assessment is to learn about the circumstances of an individual person with regard to suicide, including warning signs, risk factors, and protective factors. Risk for suicide is re-evaluated throughout the course of care to assess the patient's response to personal situational changes and clinical interventions. Accurate and defensible risk assessment requires a clinician to integrate a clinical judgment with the latest evidence-based practice, although accurate prediction of low base rate events, such as suicide, is inherently difficult and prone to false positives.
The Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS), developed and popularised by Robert Young and Vincent E Ziegler, is an eleven-item multiple choice diagnostic questionnaire which psychiatrists use to measure the presence and severity of mania and associated symptoms. The scale was originally developed for use in the evaluation of adult patients with bipolar disorder, but has since been adapted for use in pediatric patients. The scale is widely used by clinicians and researchers in the diagnosis, evaluation, and quantification of manic symptomology. It has become the most widely used outcome measure in clinical trials for bipolar disorders, and it is recognized by many regulatory agencies as an acceptable outcome measure despite its age.
The experience sampling method (ESM), also referred to as a daily diary method, or ecological momentary assessment (EMA), is an intensive longitudinal research methodology that involves asking participants to report on their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and/or environment on multiple occasions over time. Participants report on their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and/or environment in the moment or shortly thereafter. Participants can be given a journal with many identical pages. Each page can have a psychometric scale, open-ended questions, or anything else used to assess their condition in that place and time. ESM studies can also operate fully automatized on portable electronic devices or via the internet. The experience sampling method was developed by Suzanne Prescott during doctoral work at University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development with assistance from her dissertation advisor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Early studies that used ESM were coauthored by fellow students Reed W. Larson and Ronald Graef, whose dissertations both used the method.
A depression rating scale is a psychometric instrument (tool), usually a questionnaire whose wording has been validated with experimental evidence, having descriptive words and phrases that indicate the severity of depression for a time period. When used, an observer may make judgements and rate a person at a specified scale level with respect to identified characteristics. Rather than being used to diagnose depression, a depression rating scale may be used to assign a score to a person's behaviour where that score may be used to determine whether that person should be evaluated more thoroughly for a depressive disorder diagnosis. Several rating scales are used for this purpose.
The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) is a rating scale which a clinician or researcher may use to measure psychiatric symptoms such as depression, anxiety, hallucinations and unusual behaviour. The scale is one of the oldest, most widely used scales to measure psychotic symptoms and was first published in 1962.
The Health Dynamics Inventory (HDI) is a 50 item self-report questionnaire developed to evaluate mental health functioning and change over time and treatment. The HDI was written to evaluate the three aspects of mental disorders as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): "clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern...associated with present distress...or disability". This also corresponds to the phase model described by Howard and colleagues Accordingly, the HDI assesses (1) the experience of emotional or behavioral symptoms that define mental illness, such as dysphoria, worry, angry outbursts, low self-esteem, or excessive drinking, (2) the level of emotional distress related to these symptoms, and (3) the impairment or problems fulfilling the major roles of one's life.
The Comprehensive Psychopathological Rating Scale (CPRS) is a scale for rating the severity of psychiatric symptoms and observed behaviour. CPRS was developed by Swedish psychiatrists Marie Åsberg, Carlo Perris, Daisy Schalling, and Göran Sedvall in collaboration with the British psychiatrist, Stuart Montgomery.
The Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A) is a psychological questionnaire used by clinicians to rate the severity of a patient's anxiety. Anxiety can refer to things such as "a mental state...a drive...a response to a particular situation…a personality trait...and a psychiatric disorder." Though it was one of the first anxiety rating scales to be published, the HAM-A remains widely used by clinicians. It was originally published by Max Hamilton in 1959. For clinical purposes, and the purpose of this scale, only severe or improper anxiety is attended to. This scale is considered a "clinical rating" of the extensiveness of anxiety, and is intended for individuals that are "already diagnosed with anxiety neurosis."
The Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale (KADS) is a psychological self-rating scale developed by Dalhousie University professor of psychiatry Stan Kutcher, to assess the level of depression in adolescents.
The Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) is a self-report questionnaire designed to help detect bipolar disorder. It focuses on symptoms of hypomania and mania, which are the mood states that separate bipolar disorders from other types of depression and mood disorder. It has 5 main questions, and the first question has 13 parts, for a total of 17 questions. The MDQ was originally tested with adults, but it also has been studied in adolescents ages 11 years and above. It takes approximately 5–10 minutes to complete. In 2006, a parent-report version was created to allow for assessment of bipolar symptoms in children or adolescents from a caregiver perspective, with the research looking at youths as young as 5 years old. The MDQ has become one of the most widely studied and used questionnaires for bipolar disorder, and it has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
The Child Mania Rating Scales (CMRS) is a 21-item diagnostic screening measure designed to identify symptoms of mania in children and adolescents aged 9–17 using diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV, developed by Pavuluri and colleagues. There is also a 10-item short form. The measure assesses the child's mood and behavior symptoms, asking parents or teachers to rate how often the symptoms have caused a problem for the youth in the past month. Clinical studies have found the CMRS to be reliable and valid when completed by parents in the assessment of children's bipolar symptoms. The CMRS also can differentiate cases of pediatric bipolar disorder from those with ADHD or no disorder, as well as delineating bipolar subtypes. A meta-analysis comparing the different rating scales available found that the CMRS was one of the best performing scales in terms of telling cases with bipolar disorder apart from other clinical diagnoses. The CMRS has also been found to provide a reliable and valid assessment of symptoms longitudinally over the course of treatment. The combination of showing good reliability and validity across multiple samples and clinical settings, along with being free and brief to score, make the CMRS a promising tool, especially since most other checklists available for youths do not assess manic symptoms.
The Clinically Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) is an in-person clinical assessment for measuring posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The CAPS includes 30 items administered by a trained clinician to assess PTSD symptoms, including their frequency and severity. The CAPS distinguishes itself from other PTSD assessments in that it can also assess for current or past diagnoses of PTSD.
See also: University of California, San Diego Performance-Based Skills Assessment
The Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS) is a free checklist designed for children and adolescents to report traumatic events and symptoms that they might feel afterward. The items cover the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), specifically, the symptoms and clusters used in the DSM-IV. Although relatively new, there has been a fair amount of research on the CPSS due to the frequency of traumatic events involving children. The CPSS is usually administered to school children within school boundaries, or in an off-site location to assess symptoms of trauma. Some, but not all, people experience symptoms after a traumatic event, and in serious cases, these people may not get better on their own. Early and accurate identification, especially in children, of experiencing distress following a trauma could help with early interventions. The CPSS is one of a handful of promising measures that has accrued good evidence for reliability and validity, along with low cost, giving it good clinical utility as it addresses a public health need for better and larger scale assessment.
The Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (K-SADS) is a semi-structured interview aimed at early diagnosis of affective disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder. There are different versions of the test that have use different versions of diagnostic criteria, cover somewhat different diagnoses and use different rating scales for the items. All versions are structured to include interviews with both the child and the parents or guardians, and all use a combination of screening questions and more comprehensive modules to balance interview length and thoroughness.
The nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is a depressive symptom scale and diagnostic tool introduced in 2001 to screen adult patients in primary care settings. The instrument assesses for the presence and severity of depressive symptoms and a possible depressive disorder. The PHQ-9 is a component of the larger self-administered Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), but can be used as a stand-alone instrument. The PHQ is part of Pfizer's larger suite of trademarked products, called the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD). The PHQ-9 takes less than three minutes to complete. It is scored by simply adding up the individual items' scores. Each of the nine items reflects a DSM-5 symptom of depression. Primary care providers can use the PHQ-9 to screen for possible depression in patients.
The Tourette's Disorder Scale (TODS) is a psychological measure used to assess tics and co-occurring conditions in Tourette syndrome, a disease characterised by simple and complex motor and vocal tics and a wide range of behavioural and emotional symptoms. There are two versions of TODS (TODS-CR and TODS-PR), each being a 15-item scale that helps clinicians evaluate the severity of various symptoms associated with tics, inattention, hyperactivity, obsessions, compulsions, aggression and emotions.
