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Patient Health Questionnaire

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Synonyms

PHQ-9

Description

The PHQ-9 is the nine-item self-report depression scale of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) (Spitzer et al. 1999) originally developed for assessing depressive symptoms and disorders in primary care populations. It consists of nine symptoms of depression that correspond to the nine DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 1994) diagnostic criteria for a major depressive episode. For each symptom, patients indicate whether, during the previous 2 weeks, the symptom bothered them “not at all,” “several days,” “more than half the days,” or “nearly every day.” These items are scored from 0 (not at all) to 3 (nearly every day). An additional item asks patients who rated one or more symptoms as present several days or more “How difficult have these problems made it for you to do you work, take care of things at home, or get along with other people?” Responses for this item are “not difficult at all, somewhat difficult, very difficult, or extremely difficult.”...

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References and Readings

  • American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

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  • Cameron, I. M., Crawford, J. R., Lawton, K., & Reid, I. C. (2008). Psychometric comparison of the PHQ-9 and HADS for measuring depression severity in primary care. British Journal of General Practice, 58, 32–36.

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  • Fann, J. R., Bombardier, C. H., Dikmen, S., Esselman, P., Warms, C. A., Pelzer, E., et al. (2005). Validity of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 in assessing depression following traumatic brain injury. Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 20, 501–511.

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  • Kroenke, K., & Spitzer, R. L. (2002). The PHQ-9: A new depression diagnostic and severity measure. Psychiatric Annals, 32, 509–515.

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  • Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. W. (2001). The PHQ-9: Validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16, 606–613.

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  • Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., & Williams, J. B. W. (1999). Validation and utility of a self-report version of PRIME-MD: The PHQ primary care study. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 1737–1744.

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  • Williams, L. S., Brizendine, E. J., Plue, L., Bakas, T., Tu, W., Hendrie, H., et al. (2005). Performance of the PHQ-9 as a screening tool for depression after stroke. Stroke, 36, 635–638.

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Correspondence to Dawn M. Ehde .

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Ehde, D.M. (2018). Patient Health Questionnaire. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_2002

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