The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, abbreviated as HDRS, HRSD or HAM-D, measures depression in people before, during and after treatment. A depression rating scale is a psychiatric measurement instrument that has descriptive words and phrases that indicate the severity of depression over a period of time. When used, an observer can make judgments and rate a person at a specific scale level with respect to the characteristics identified. Instead of being used to diagnose depression, a depression assessment scale can be used to assign a score to a person's behavior, where that score can be used to determine if that person should be evaluated more thoroughly for the diagnosis of a depressive disorder.
For this purpose, several rating scales are used. Psychiatrists sometimes use rating scales as a way to assess the nature and severity of a patient's symptoms and monitor their clinical progress. Depression rating scales are standardized instruments that measure the severity of symptoms of depression over a period of time. Scales provide descriptive words and phrases that indicate the severity of symptoms of depression.
When researchers use depression rating scales, they can make judgments and rate a patient based on a specific scale, taking into account the characteristics observed. A large number of rating scales have been designed to evaluate the clinical construction of “depression”. These scales have been universally used in research with little regard to their content or how they relate to accepted definitions of depressive disorder. Scales are often arbitrarily selected and used for the study on the assumption that they all measure the same construct.
Item analysis of several of the most commonly used depression scales reveals variation in the areas of psychopathology they cover; some scales place greater emphasis on the assessment of anxiety than on depressed mood. Since disturbance in neurobiological systems is manifested by specific aspects of affective and behavioral malfunctioning, and since psychodynamic factors lead to particular cognitive sets, the progress of research will depend on the construction and validation of measures more refined than those provided by the current approach. It has been clear for some time that the use of health services is more influenced by how people feel than by their “objective” symptoms. Research has also shown that adherence to treatment regimens depends on the impact of such treatment on the patient's well-being.
These findings highlight the need to assess the patient's view of their progress in the health care system. This has led to a growing interest in quality of life assessment and, in particular, to the impact of the disease and its treatment on the patient's quality of life. Surprisingly, interest in quality of life measures for the evaluation of outcomes in psychiatry has been slower to develop than in other specialties. While there are several measures of the severity of depressive symptoms completed by physicians and patients, there is no measure of the quality of life of depressed patients.
This article describes the development and testing of the Quality of Life in Depression Scale (QLDS), a new measure designed to fill this gap. The theoretical basis of the instrument is that life gains its quality from the capacity and capacity of the individual to meet his needs. The items included in the QLDS were derived from 30 qualitative interviews with depressed or recently recovered patients. More interviews were conducted with depressed patients to establish the validity of the face and the content of the instrument.
Respondents had little trouble completing the questionnaire and found that the content was relevant to their experience of depression. The QLDS represents an important advance in our ability to understand the impact of depression on quality of life. One way to distinguish between variables is to determine the scale of measurement of the variable. To determine the measurement scale, focus on the object being measured and not on the numbers themselves.
To illustrate this, see Table 4.2, which shows three different measures for two teams participating in an adventure race. Look at the first line, an 8 and a 16, which are the identification numbers of the two teams. What can you say about the two teams based on these two numbers? The two numbers just tell you that they are two different teams and nothing else. This general definition of measurement is also consistent with measurement in psychology.
Psychological measurement is often referred to as psychometrics. To do this, you can use a backward digit interval task, in which you read a two-digit list to the person and ask him to repeat them in reverse order. Then repeat this several times, increasing the length of the list by one digit each time, until the person makes a mistake. The length of the longest list for which the person answers correctly is the score and represents their working memory capacity.
Or imagine a clinical psychologist who is interested in how depressed a person is. Administer the Beck Depression Inventory, which is a 21-point self-report questionnaire where the person rates the extent to which they have felt sad, lost energy, and experienced other symptoms of depression in the past 2 weeks. The sum of these 21 ratings is the score and represents your current level of depression. Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia: It incorporates information based on observers and informants and is useful for evaluating depression in patients with cognitive impairment.
For example, the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale includes 21 questions with between 3 and 5 possible answers that increase in severity. Finally, the measurement level of the ratio involves assigning scores in such a way that there is a true zero point representing the total absence of the quantity. At the follow-up visit, PHQ-9 is used to measure response to treatment and identify specific symptoms that do not respond. This is what allows researchers to draw useful general conclusions, such as “stress is negatively correlated with the functioning of the immune system, as opposed to more specific and less useful ones, such as “people's scores on the Perceived Stress Scale are negatively correlated with their white blood cell counts.
This depression assessment scale includes a 27-item screening questionnaire and a follow-up physician interview designed to facilitate diagnosis of common mental disorders in primary care. The key message about measuring scales is that the interpretation of numbers such as 8 and 16 depends on the measurement scale. Screening programs that use rating scales have been proposed to search for candidates for deeper evaluation to improve depression screening, but there is evidence that they do not improve screening rates, treatment, or outcome. The Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) This self-report instrument has been studied in multiple settings.
More formally, an operational definition is a description of the procedures used by the researcher to measure a variable or create levels of a variable. In psychology, intelligence quotient (IQ) is often considered to be measured at the interval level. Psychiatrists have a wide variety of depression assessment scales available for use in their clinical practice. .
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