Citation

Taiminen TJ, Saarijärvi S, Helenius H, Keskinen A, Korpilahti T, Salokangas RK. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 1996; 94(3): 185-186.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, Turku University Central Hospital, Finland.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1996, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

8891085

Abstract

The Depression Scale (DEPS), a new screening instrument for detecting depression in primary health care, was compared with the Hamilton Depression Scale (HDS) among 50 suicide attempters. Using the HDS as a gold standard, the positive and negative predictive values of the DEPS for the diagnosis of depression were 98% and 20%, respectively. The correlation between the total HDS scores and the total DEPS scores was 0.60. The DEPS may help general practitioners to detect depression among suicide attempters, but it should not be used to exclude depression.

Language: en