Snaith P
Academic Unit of Psychiatry, St James's University Hospital, Leeds.
Br J Psychiatry. 1993 Sep;163:293-8. doi: 10.1192/bjp.163.3.293.
A large number of rating scales have been devised to assess the clinical construct of 'depression'. These scales have been universally used in research with little consideration of their content, or how they relate to accepted definitions of depressive disorder. The scales are often arbitrarily selected and used for the study on the assumption that all measure the same construct. The item analysis of a number of the most widely used depression scales reveals a variation in the areas of psychopathology they cover; some scales place greater emphasis upon the assessment of anxiety than upon depressed mood. Since disturbance in neurobiological systems is manifest by specific aspects of affective and behavioural malfunction, and since psychodynamic factors lead to particular cognitive sets, the advancement of research will depend upon the construction and validation of more refined measures than are provided by the present approach.
为评估“抑郁症”这一临床概念，人们设计了大量评定量表。这些量表在研究中被广泛使用，却很少考虑其内容，也不考虑它们与抑郁症公认定义的关系。这些量表往往是随意挑选并用于研究，假定所有量表都测量相同的概念。对一些使用最广泛的抑郁量表进行项目分析后发现，它们所涵盖的精神病理学领域存在差异；一些量表更侧重于焦虑评估而非抑郁情绪评估。由于神经生物学系统的紊乱通过情感和行为功能障碍的特定方面表现出来，且由于心理动力学因素导致特定的认知模式，研究的进展将取决于构建和验证比现有方法更精确的测量工具。
