About the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)
Aaron Beck was a young psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s when he began noticing patterns in his depressed patients' cognitive content. Depressed patients consistently reported negative thoughts about themselves, their environment, and their future - what Beck later called the 'cognitive triad' of depression. In 1961 he operationalized these observations into a brief self-report depression assessment: the Beck Depression Inventory.
The original 1961 BDI had 21 items, each presenting four statements of increasing severity (e.g., 'I do not feel sad' / 'I feel sad' / 'I am sad all the time and I can't snap out of it' / 'I am so sad or unhappy that I can't stand it'). Patients selected the statement best describing their experience over the past week. Total score ranged from 0 to 63, with cutoffs for minimal, mild, moderate, and severe depression.
The BDI became extraordinarily influential. It is the most-cited depression assessment in the research literature (tens of thousands of studies have used it). Beck's clinical observations about depressive cognition also formed the basis of his Cognitive Therapy (1979), now called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - the most empirically-supported psychotherapy for depression, anxiety, and many other conditions. CBT is now the standard psychotherapy taught in clinical training programs worldwide. The BDI went through revisions in 1971 (BDI-IA) and 1996 (BDI-II, current edition aligned with DSM-IV criteria). It remains the dominant brief depression assessment in clinical and research settings.
The 1 subtests
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
BDI and BDI-II items are under Pearson copyright. We document the instrument's history and significance.
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