Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21)
A 21-item self-report of the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety, and stress over the past week. Administer under clinician oversight.
This is a clinical instrument. It is not publicly self-administered; a clinician assigns it through a secure patient link.
You learn how much depression, anxiety and stress each contribute to how you have felt this past week.
For anyone who wants to tell apart low mood, anxiety and stress in their own life.
It comes from clinical research that separates depression, anxiety and tension into three related but distinct states.
What this test is
Welcome. A 21-item self-report of the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety, and stress over the past week. Administer under clinician oversight.
The measure
The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) was developed by Lovibond and Lovibond (1995). It has 21 items, each answered on a 4-point (Did not apply to me at all … Applied to me very much, or most of the time) scale. Its scores cover Depression, Anxiety and Stress.
Lovibond, S. H., & Lovibond, P. F. (1995). Manual for the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (2nd ed.). Sydney: Psychology Foundation of Australia.
At a glance
What it measures
Twenty-one statements describe three negative emotional states over the past week. The Depression scale covers low mood, hopelessness, loss of interest and a sense that life is meaningless. The Anxiety scale covers physical arousal and fear: a dry mouth, breathing difficulty, trembling and worry about panicking. The Stress scale covers persistent tension: difficulty relaxing, irritability, over-reacting and being easily upset. Each statement is rated by how much it applied over the past week.
Lovibond and Lovibond (1995) developed the scales to separate depression and anxiety as cleanly as possible. In doing so they found a third cluster, a state of chronic tension and irritability, which they called stress. The structure fits the tripartite model of Clark and Watson (1991), in which general distress is shared by anxiety and depression while low positive emotion is specific to depression and physiological arousal is specific to anxiety.
Each seven-item scale is summed and doubled so that it can be read against the bands of the original long form. Higher scores on a scale indicate that the corresponding state was more frequent and intense over the past week. The three scores are read side by side: the profile shows whether distress is mainly low mood, mainly physical anxiety, mainly tension, or a mixture. The scales describe symptoms, not diagnoses.
The scales are used in clinical services to describe the shape of a person's distress and to track change over treatment, and in research as a compact multi-dimensional outcome measure. On this site, the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 follow diagnostic criteria for depression and generalized anxiety, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) measures appraised stress over the past month, and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) measures distress as a single dimension.
Validity evidence
Confirmatory factor analysis supports the three-factor structure, and the subscales show good convergent validity with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories (Henry & Crawford, 2005).
Subscales
Depression 7 items
Anxiety 7 items
Stress 7 items
Example item
“I found it hard to wind down”
Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.
Scoring & interpretation
Each subscale is summed (with any published multiplier) and compared against its own cutoff bands.
The report explains which published screening bands your score falls in and what they mean.
References
- Lovibond, S. H., & Lovibond, P. F. (1995). Manual for the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (2nd ed.). Psychology Foundation of Australia.
- Antony, M. M., Bieling, P. J., Cox, B. J., Enns, M. W., & Swinson, R. P. (1998). Psychometric properties of the 42-item and 21-item versions of the DASS in clinical and community samples. Psychological Assessment, 10(2), 176-181.
- Henry, J. D., & Crawford, J. R. (2005). The short-form version of the DASS-21: construct validity and normative data in a large non-clinical sample. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44(2), 227-239.
Sample report preview
The report opens with a profile of your scores on each of the 3 scales (Depression, Anxiety, and Stress), drawn on a common scale so the highest and lowest areas stand out. Each one then receives a short plain-language explanation of what a higher or lower standing describes. It closes with guidance on reading the results and on the limits of self-report.
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Subscale scores | Your score on each of the 3 subscales. |
| Score bands | Where your score falls among the published bands listed on this page. |
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Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10)Measures general psychological distress over the past four weeks.