Diagnostic accuracy in adolescents of several depression rating scales extracted from a general purpose behavior checklist.

Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis of six depression scales extracted from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Youth Self-report (YSR) in a clinically referred sample of adolescents (N = 667) showed that their performance in discriminating between depressed and not depressed patients was comparable to other specifically designed depression rating scales (area under the ROC curves between 0.75 and 0.82). Performance was better for boys than for girls. These results suggest that specific depression self-report rating scales may be unnecessary in adolescents if CBCL or YSR data are available, and that self-reports are not more accurate than parent-reports in the identification of depression in this age group.