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PROMIS Depression

PROMIS. "Depression" item bank and scoring manual.

Key findings used in wiki

  • PROMIS treats depression as a distinct construct from anxiety, with its own item bank and standardized T-score interpretation.
  • Higher T-scores mean more depressive symptoms. Items focus on negative mood, views of self, social cognition, and decreased positive affect over the past seven days.
  • The PROMIS Depression bank intentionally avoids somatic items (sleep, appetite, fatigue) because those overlap with general physical illness and can inflate scores in medically ill populations — a design choice that matters when measuring caregivers with chronic conditions of their own.
  • In GiveCare's methodology pages, this supports treating depressed mood as a specific construct rather than collapsing it into a caregiver-burden total.