Take Our Depression Screening Tool
“My Self Check score indicated that maybe it’s time to stop lying to myself and pretending I’m ok… I’m going to reach out.” – Age 31, Australia
Our Self Check can help you get a better sense of the most common symptoms of depression and the impact they may be having on your life.
Each question asks about a different symptom and how it has been affecting you over the last two weeks. Depression consists of a lot more than sadness, so the questions aren’t only about your mood. Depression also affects:
- How you think (for eg. your ability to concentrate or make decisions)
- What you think about (for eg. thoughts of failure or pessimism about the future)
- Your body and behaviour (for eg. lack of energy or poor sleep)
As you go through the Self Check, answer as honestly as you can. Being honest with yourself about how you are doing is a key step toward improving your mental health.
After you complete and submit the Self Check, we’ll provide some tailored tips and advice based on your score to help you better manage and improve your mental health.
There are also some overlapping health issues, like hypothyroidism, that can cause symptoms that are similar to depression. If your Self Check score is high, it’s important to see a doctor who can help get you set up with appropriate treatments and rule out other potential health issues.
Whatever your Self Check score is, there are ways to improve your life, and we’ll do our best to guide you. Taking the Self Check on its own won’t lessen your symptoms, but putting the tips and advice we offer into practice will help you move forward on the road to recovery.
We often set aside our own health and prioritize things like work and other responsibilities, but depression is as real of an illness as any other, like diabetes or high blood pressure, and is best treated with support from a doctor and/or mental health professionals. Delaying treatment when you need it only makes things worse.
Gender:
HeadsUpGuys asks about gender to help us better understand our visitors, learn more about men's mental health, and inform the creation of future content.
Your score is :
Track Your Progress
Here is a recap of your responses. You have the option to save your responses for your own use, or to print to bring to your doctor or specialists. We highly encourage you to save your results to record your symptoms and monitor your improvement.
Come back and track your progress
- Many guys use the Self Check as a tool to track their progress and know when it is time to reach out and take additional steps to improve their mental health.
Disclaimer
Our Self Check is based on a standardized and well established depression screening tool.[1] Though it is the same check often used by doctors and mental health professionals to help assess the presence and severity of depression, you should not use our Self Check or any other quick assessment tool to make a diagnosis by yourself.
A Self Check score is a general indication of how you are doing, not a label to judge yourself with. Men who’ve gotten the highest scores possible have recovered from depression. The Self Check helps provide an assessment of how you are doing right now – it does not predict how you will do in the future.
Privacy
This tool is anonymous and no personally identifying information is required. Contact information for our email newsletter (if you choose to opt-in) and your Self Check responses are stored separately. See our terms, privacy, and conditions for more information.
References
- Our Self Check is based on the nine item self-administered Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). The questions are based on the diagnostic criteria of depression from the DSM-IV.
Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. (2001). The PHQ-9: validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16(9), 606–613. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x