Cognitive Assessment Tool: Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS)

Cognition
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Cognitive assessment tools are commonly used for screening impairment, determining the severity of a clinical disorder, evaluating the differential diagnosis, and monitoring disease progression in patients (Edelstein et al., 2010). There are numerous assessment tools for cognitive function. One of them is Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). It is a self-report tool used to measure depression in older adults by identifying the symptoms of the disorder. The scale is a 30 or 15-item self-report instrument that uses a yes/no format (Mitchell et al., 2010). It can be used with medically ill adults, healthy adults, and adults with mild to moderate cognitive impairment.
One of the benefits of this assessment tool is that it evaluates the severity of depression in a geriatric population. It also identifies symptoms of depression in older adults. Another benefit of GDS is that it serves as an ideal for monitoring depression treatment (Greenberg, 2012). Without GDS and other assessment tools, the elderly will not receive the treatment they need. Besides, this tool is easy to administer and interpret. It does not require prior psychiatric knowledge and has been appropriately validated in various environments (Pracheth et al., 2013).
The purpose of GDS is to screen for depression in geriatric populations by tapping the behavioral symptoms of depression. The tool has the following features: self-administered questionnaire, easy interpretation, and an excellent depression screening tool. To assess depression using this tool, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or a physician admits a self-report questionnaire to a geriatric population (Pracheth et al., 2013). Each question requires only a yes or no answer from the respondents. The full scale contains 30 polar questions, and the short form contains 15 (Mitchell et al., 2010). The test is scored when the elderly have answered all the questions. For both long and short-form tests, the scoring sheet lists the responses present in depressed people.
The severity of depression relies on the number of questions selected. For the full scale, the number of answers the respondents choose f...