The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS)

Purpose: To measure depression and anxiety in hospital and community settings

Age: 18+ years

Time: Untimed (approximately 2-5 minutes)

The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) is a self-rating scale that measures anxiety and depression in both hospital and community settings.

HADS can detect the presence and severity of mild degrees of mood disorder, anxiety and depression using one brief questionnaire.

HADS gives clinically meaningful results as a psychological screening tool and can assess the symptom severity and caseness of anxiety disorders and depression in patients with illness and the general population.

Key Features

• Brief questionnaire containing seven questions for anxiety and seven for depression, which can be answered within 2 – 5 minutes
• Suitable for administration by a range of clinical professionals along with researchers assessing emotional disorders in adults
• HADS facilitates the early identification of both anxiety and depression simultaneously, whilst giving a separate score for each – helping aid the referral to appropriate services
• Easy to score and simple to interpret
• Provides clear cut-off scores to indicate the severity of the disorder to help inform appropriate interventions
• It is ideal for use as a screening measure, and index of clinical change, an outcome measure and for research purposes