People experience anxiety in different ways. Some tend to eat to much, while others let this off through smoking and drinking. Unfortunately, not everybody takes this the same way. When a person feels unhappy or loses the appetite to eat, there is a chance that the individual is suffering from depression.
Doctors have not yet been able to measure the degree into how bad depression can get. This is the reason that some scientists have made a self report scale called a depression anxiety stress scale. The objective of the study is to provide scientists and researchers better information to treat this problem.
The scale is divided into three sets. The first is the depression scale which will assess the person's perception in life and interest in certain things.
The second is the anxiety scale which looks into situational anxiety, autonomic arousal, skeletal muscle effects and subjective experience of anxious effect.
The third is the stress scale which will look into how long before the person feels stressed. This will look into things that will arouse or upset the individual. This also includes what things makes one nervous or causes difficulty in relaxing.
Each of these are composed of 14 items that is subdivided again into 2 to 5 items which just goes to show how long and extensive the test can be. The person answers each question by answering on a scale of 1 to 4 which will assess how stressed the individual is for the week.
If the person has a hard time answering these questions, there is a shorter version that can be used. Doctors don't only administer this with people who have anxiety disorders. The test is also given to regular people as part of the comparative report.
The questionnaires to be given out can be done individually or in groups. This is sometimes used in children as early as 12 years of age to determine if stress is caused by work or when this occurs as the individual is growing up.
Large companies who are concerned about the employees sometimes employ the help of social workers to administer the depression anxiety stress scale or DASS on people. These firms should remember that the results of these tests can only be translated by those in the medical field so that recommendations and treatment can take place.
There are two main differences between this test and those used in the past.
The first is that the DASS is that it is based on a dimensional rather than a categorical conception of what the patient may be experiencing.
The second is that it separates the categories into three namely depression, anxiety and stress and treating this separately to give a bigger picture of what is happening to the patient.
This means that classifying a person on the degree of help is far different and that this is often regarded as normal, moderate or severe as written in the DASS manual.
The DASS questionnaire can be downloaded for free from the internet. The person will have to pay $55 or more for the manual to be able to understand the findings of anyone who has taken the test.
The individual can learn more about this by surfing the web or reading up on this in some medical journals to get a better understanding of how this can help treat a patient.
