and/or severity labels for the DASS?
Emotional syndromes like depression and anxiety are intrinsically dimensional – they vary along a continuum of severity. Hence the selection of a single cutoff score to represent clinical severity is necessarily arbitrary. This is one of the fundamental differences between the DASS and categorical measures based on psychiatric diagnosis (see FAQ13). Recognising the dimensional nature of emotional syndromes leads to a more sophisticated assessment of disturbance. For example, individuals who fall just short of a clinical cutoff are correctly recognised as experiencing considerable symptoms and as being at high risk of developing more extreme symptoms. For most research purposes, it is much better to use DASS scores rather than attempt to divide a sample into normal vs clinical or high vs low. However, for clinical purposes, we recognise that it can be helpful to have conventional labels to help characterise degree of severity relative to the population. Therefore we have developed a set
