Find Out How The Depression Test Helps In The Diagnosis

Depression is today's world is as common a word as stress. Everybody suffers from this disorder - children, young and old adults, men and women; everybody is affected by it in some measure or other. This could be mainly attributed to the fact that the 21st century life is very stressful and most people are not able to cope with its demands.

The Symptoms Of Depression

There are many types of depression and each one of these types is characterized by different symptoms. However, generally speaking a few indicators would be common to almost all the types. Most people suffering from this malady would feel at one time or other some level of hopelessness and self-hatred. They would also experience sleeping and eating disorders and they would be more likely to fall prey to substance abuse problems. Sadness and despondent behavior is another common symptom.

As you can see, these symptoms are very common. Everybody feels low, experiences sleepless nights or have attacks of unexplained hunger at some point in their lives. Does it mean that all suffer from depression? In order to find out whether you are indeed suffering from this malady or not you would need to take the depression test.

The Goldberg Depression Test

The Goldberg depression test has been designed by Dr Ivan Goldberg to measure the degrees of depression that a person might be suffering of. There are in total eighteen questions in this test and the person would need to answer them with a set of standard answers which have been assigned points on a 0-5 scale, i.e. 0 - not at all, 1 - a little, 2 - somewhat, 3 - moderately, 4 - quite a lot and lastly 5 - very much. In this manner, when you answer ‘not at all' you score 0 points; when you answer ‘a little' you score 1 point and so on.

This depression test is pretty accurate in measuring the level of depression the person is suffering from. The diagnosis depends upon the score achieved - 9 and below means there is no depression; a score of 10-17 indicates minor depression; 18-21 - crossing into depression; 22-35 - moderate depression; 36-53 - on the verge of severe depression and lastly above 54 - severe depression.

The Beck Depression Test

There is another popular depression test called the Beck depression inventory test which consists of 21 questions in similar lines as the Goldberg test. Here too the answers are marked on a scale of five fixed answers which have been allotted points ranging from zero to five. The total score would be an indication of how deep the depression has affected the person and thereby early diagnosis would be facilitated.