Assessment of mood: guides for clinicians

This article is one of the series of review articles aiming to present a convenient guideline for practicing clinicians in their selection of scales for clinical and research purposes. This article focuses on assessment scales for mood (depression, mania).

After reviewing the basic principles of clinical psychometrics, we present a selective review of representative scales measuring depressed or manic mood.

We reviewed and reported on reliability, validity, interpretability, and feasibility of the following rating scales: Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), K6, Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II), and Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology Self-Report (QIDS-SR) as self-report scales for depressed mood; Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D) and Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) as clinician-administered measure for depression; and Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS) as a clinician-administered instrument for mania.

Although the rating scales for mood represent a well-trodden terrain, this brief review of the most frequently used scales in the literature revealed there is still some room for improvement and for further research, especially with regard to their clinical interpretability.