Screening for depression is an important first step in getting treatment for people who are depressed. Primary care physicians and mental health professionals use a number of brief surveys and interviews to assist in making a depression diagnosis. Online tools and screenings can help you understand the symptoms, though these should not be substituted for medical care. The most common depression screening tools are outlined below.
Interviews
Clinical psychologists and other trained mental health care professionals evaluate symptoms of depression based on specific criteria outlined in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition." This criteria involves conducting a semi-structured interview for disorders (SCID). It is a lengthy interview that provides different assessment modules for each diagnostic category in the DSM-IV. These modules can be administered separately, so an interview specifically focused on depression can be conducted.
Another interview called the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) is a fully-structured interview designed to be administered by lay interviewers who are not necessarily licensed clinicians. Like the SCID, it has a depression module that can be isolated and administered separately. The CIDI is designed to assess mental disorders according to the criteria of both the DSM-IV and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) established by the World Health Organization.
Questionnaires
General medical practitioners often rely on questionnaires for screening patients for depression. Mental health care professionals will often use questionnaires to supplement depression screening interviews. These surveys are typically brief (21 questions or less) and are comprised of multiple choice or rating-scale type questions about depression symptoms.
Questionnaires commonly used to aid in the assessment of depressive symptoms include the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), the Zung Self-Assessment Depression Scale, and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Others include the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology-Self Report (QIDS-SR), the Wakefield Self-Report Questionnaire, the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, and the Goldberg Depression Questionnaire and Geriatric Depression Rating Scale, both of which are designed specifically to screen for depression in older adults.
Online Self-Assessment Tools
There are a number of self-assessment tools available online to help people determine whether they might be experiencing symptoms of depression. Some of these tools are reproductions of actual questionnaires used by clinicians. For example, the CES-D and Wakefield Depression Test are both accessible online. In other cases, depression screening tools are proprietary surveys created by web services providers. Mental Health America, a nonprofit mental health association, provides an online depression screening tool, for example (see Resources below).
It is important to remember that these are not a substitute for formal depression assessment and diagnosis, so you should contact a qualified healthcare professional for help if you suspect you may be depressed.
