Author(s)

John R. Rossiter

School of Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia.

The background to this paper is that current measures of depression are unsatisfactory because they fail to distinguish between different types of depression, notably those that are biologically caused and require medication versus the more common reactive type of depression that is treatable, if necessary, by a psychologist. The first part of the paper, aimed mainly at researchers, criticizes the major measures of depression in use at present. The second part of the paper, aimed mainly at practitioners, offers a new multi-diagnostic depression measure called the DEP-6, an efficient 6-item clinician-rated questionnaire which enables the clinician to distinguish the patient’s primary type of depression and choose an appropriate first line of treatment. The present author developed the DEP-6 by using the DSM-5 to identify the core symptoms of each of the main types of depression and closely related disorders. Specific combinations of the core symptoms enable the clinician to make a primary diagnosis of psychosis, bipolar disorder, biological depression, or reactive depression, or to conclude that no clinical depression is present. The DEP-6 is freely available in this article and can be easily translated into other languages.

Types of Depression, Problems with Existing Measures, New 6-Item Depression Screener

Rossiter, J. (2022) The DEP-6: A Brief Multi-Diagnostic Measure of Depression. Psychology, 13, 853-871. doi: 10.4236/psych.2022.136058.