Assessment of Depression Using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale

The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), initially developed for efficient evaluation of treatment response in clinical psychopharmacology research, has been widely used for the assessment of severity of depression and for the descriptive classification of depressive disorders. The initial version of the BPRS, which was published in 1962, consisted of 16 symptom-rating constructs representing distinct aspects of manifest psychopathology that had been identified in a series of factor analyses of larger item pools [21]. Interest in use of the BPRS for descriptive classification of psychiatric patients, as well as for rapid and efficient assessment of treatment response in selected target populations, prompted the addition in 1966 of two rating constructs to better delineate excited states and organic brain syndromes. That resulted in the current form of the instrument, which has been reproduced in numerous previous publications [8, 9, 18, 19, 20].