A note in passing

[kaberett]

Should you wish to horrify people with Academic Citations, Whisman & Richardson (2015) gives a Beck Depression Inventory mode score of 0, on a sample of 15233 US college students.

Comments

[cadenzamuse]

!!!

[niqaeli]

I still find this baffling. Like, I know it's TRUE, but I genuinely cannot comprehend how in the fuck it is even possible to score a 0 on the BDI, much less for that to be the most common score.

[kaberett]

Y U P

(M is obviously the source of this Charming Fact, but I went to actually look up the citation this evening because of a conversation elsenet, and HAVING dug it out I wanted to stick it somewhere I could find it again in future.)

[kaberett]

right

[delight]

So I work at a psychiatric hospital!

I grabbed everyone on my floor who is actually trained in psychology (because of my position I'm technically 'admin,' so that's only 4 out of like 20 people -- the majority of the people here are finance, I run a program -- to clarify, I am one of the four people) to show them this and everyone just stared for a minute.

Then sent the link to the clinical directors. They can choose whether or not to make their staff cry.

[alexseanchai]

...what am I missing here?

[kaberett]

AHAHAHAHAHA YOU'RE WELCOME

[kaberett]

Are you familiar with the BDI questions? I ask because A Bunch Of Us hereabouts hover at a score of around ~20, and just sort of stare in blank disbelief at the idea that the most common score is 0, because howwwwwwwww can people not score even ONE point?!

[batrachian]

I'm not seeing it in the link, but am now deeply curious what the actual distribution WAS (other than "non-normal")

Also, um. Haven't seen the questions m'self and not sure what I'd score.

(Probably not a fucking zero.)

[kaberett]

Want me to dig out a link to the questions for you, or would that be too much hitting-your-brain-over-the-head for one week? <3

[rmc28]

I just had to look this up, but wikipedia sez the BDI measures from 0 to 63, the higher the number the more depressed. So 0 means not at all depressed, and modal score means that was the most common score in that US College population.

I don't find this surprising or horrifying, but I've never been chronically or severely depressed[1], so I think this is about differences in perspective ...


[1] I have had several episodes of mild to moderate depression, but all but one seem to have been triggered by lengthy periods of stress, and went away when I got enough support to do something about the stress (even my formally diagnosed post-natal depression fits that pattern). The exception was a specific birth control pill, and the depression went away amazingly fast when I stopped taking it.

[batrachian]

All knowledge is worth having.

(That is, yes. Please.)

(I really do need a Kusheline icon...)

CN suicidal ideation

[kaberett]

By way of comparison, I think I was about 21 and Finally On Drugs before I discovered what "baseline neutral-to-happy" rather than "baseline kinda-want-to-die" was like. I first started asking questions about how one could die without getting other people in trouble when I was in primary school, as I recall, which is definitely a Completely Normal thing for an eight-year-old to be thinking about, right.

As such I assume that "some degree of chronic depression, but handling it" is pretty much everyone's baseline state; the idea that the modal score is zero is... so alien that it's difficult to empathise with!

[kaberett]

Here you go -- haven't clicked all the way through but looks about right from the bits I have checked!

oooh, that doesn't give you the actual numerical score (I've just gone all the way through), but it's scored at 0 points for the first statement up to 3 points for the fourth statement for each question.

[niqaeli]

here's a .pdf I turned up.

Re: CN suicidal ideation

[rmc28]

My score isn't currently zero, but it's single figures (and also, answers like "I am more fatigued than I used to be" are things that are strictly true but entirely explained by having had cancer, not mental health). I have definitely known zero.

So yeah, there's a whole load of work you're doing that most people, including me, just don't have to, because we lucked out.

[batrachian]

...main takeaway seems to be "gods these are vague and nebulous questions and I wish to write paragraphs on why the underlying assumptions are Wrong."

(8, with multiple asterisks.)

Re: CN suicidal ideation

[kaberett]

<3

(this is always some of the fun of depression inventories for me, yeah, the bit where I'm also really ill in general and that inevitably brings my score up; what this means in practice, at least for the PHQ-9, is that for me personally 6 is an Actually Good score, I usually these days while well-medicated and stably housed muddle along at 7-8, and it's not worth seeing a medic about until I hit 13.)

[kaberett]

HA, right, so some of the thing with the BDI (and indeed the PHQ-9) is that they're asking about how you have felt over the past two weeks. It's not, as the PHQ-9 implies, how often you have actually experienced those feelings or whatever (PHQ-9 answers are not at all/several days/more than half the days/almost every day), it's what, right now, do you feel like the past two weeks have been like. Which isn't quite the question that they're asking, more or less, and some of the phrasings are... Unhelpful, but yeah, it's one of the problems with these tests. <3

[batrachian]

Ah. My objections were...not about that, and more about things like, um. I feel that "serious concern about the future" our however it was worded is ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED given....2016/7/8...

Also comparing "the last two weeks" to some other time does not adequately capture "my baseline may in fact be fucked". Plus the complete lack of, hmmm, I'll call them "other-end" tick boxes. The zero response was frequently in the middle of possible states?

surveys are hard to write sensibly and basically impossible to do without bias, but augh. Bugs me.

[sporky_rat]

Zero?!

Well.

(My BDI runs about 21, and that's on good meds.)

[kaberett]

heh. yeah. all of that too. <3 but at least in terms of 2016/7/8, they're trying to capture effective depression regardless of whether it's reasonably globally situational, sooooooooo...

[sporky_rat]

(My PHQ-9 has been on the 16-17 range for the last year even with meds. My NP is getting grumpy about how my depression isn't eating up with meds, but her nurse is pretty well at the point of 'are you functional? Can you get through the day and and do what you need to do? Then for now, we'll keep doing what we can.' my NP's nurse is Eminently Practical.)

[batrachian]

So They(tm) aren't measuring the things they think they are.

I wish I could be surprised.

[mathemagicalschema]

That is absolutely wild. Who are these people???

(Right now my score is 30. I am on meds and in therapy.)