Background: Iranian researchers and scientists in the fields of psychiatry and psychology undoubtedly need to spend more time and make considerable efforts to prepare and validate Persian versions of measurements. The present study was designed to validate HADS in Iranian clinically anxious and depressed patients compared to normal population.
Methods: 261 anxious and depressed patients referred to the inpatient clinic of Rouzbeh Psychiatric Hospital, Tehran, and 261 healthy volunteers (matched for their sex) were tested using HADS, and two additional clinical tools, ie., BDI & BAI. Then the patients were interviewed by a psychiatrist or a psychologist (using DSM IV checklist) and rated for their anxiety and depression severity levels based on a 10-point scale from 1 to 10. BDI and BAI were regarded as objective device providing other external criteria to examine validity further. Moreover, to assess reliability 10% of the patients (n= 27) were randomly selected and re-tested after three days.
Results: Findings showed that all measures and their subscales proved to be valid and reliable with good internal consistencies in Iranian depressed and anxious patients. This study provides clinicians and researchers with Iranian cut-off points for HADS, BDI and BAI, to be used in their settings, to categorize the patients with different levels of psychopathology.
Conclusion: The results support the use of all the measures and subscales examined in this study in clinical and research settings. The cut-off points obtained in this study are somehow different from those presented by original authors which will be discussed from cultural point of view in this report.