[The development of depression inventory].

This paper describes the development of Depression Inventory (DI), its reliability, validity, and distributional value of DI score, using a sample of 329 currently depressed patients from 24 hospitals. Comparing to Hamilton Depression Scale (HDS), the correlation efficient between Hamilton Depression Scale and DI, and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) is 0.608 and 0.536, respectively. The validity of DI is better than BDI. Item contents of DI are understood and rated easily for depressive patients. Four factors are derived from DI, those are alarm, agitation, somatic symptoms, and depression/retardation. Factor construction and items of DI are reasonable, and reflect the clinical features of depression, especially the alarm factor provides a parametric index for prevention and prediction of suicide.