This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Michael R. Mandel, MD
Department of Psychological Medicine Pacific Medical Center San Francisco, Calif

Joanne B. Severe, MS; Nina R. Schooler, PhD
National Institute of Mental Health Rockville, MD 20857

Alan J. Gelenberg, MD; Marlene Mieske, RN, MS
Department of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, Mass

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1983;40(9):1036.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

Dr Prakash is correct in his statement that the HDS was originally developed to measure change in depressive symptoms among patients who had already received the diagnosis of depression. However, the scale has been widely used as a diagnostic aid, with a range of cutoff scores used to define patient groups. Thus, our use, as indicated in the original article, is not without some scientific precedent. Further, in agreement with Dr Prakash, we recognize that the HDS may not be the best measure of depressive symptoms in schizophrenic patients. For this reason, we also examined ratings of depressive mood obtained from the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale and looked at HDS scores, deleting items such as work and activities that might have been affected by schizophrenic deficits rather than specific depressive features. Results with these measures were congruent with those obtained with the HDS.

The many variations of the HDS are . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?