Those who have wrestled with the choice of a depression measure will have discovered that no instrument covers all symptoms of depression. For an outcome measure or a measure of severity, this may not matter; for screening instruments, however, there may be stronger arguments for comprehensive coverage. The choice between self-report and clinician-rating methods is complex but some guidelines can be given. Self-rating methods are economical and do not require a skilled administrator. They cannot provide diagnostic information but serve well as screening instruments. For this, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), or Zung instruments are suitable. The main difficulty with self-ratings lies in the respondent’s lack of skill and experience: having a limited perspective on the range of severity of depression, she can only rely on her own experience in judging severity of symptoms, so self-rating methods are limited as measures of intensity of depression (4, p408). Self-ratings assume, of course, that accurate information will be reported; this may be problematic because a depressed patient may not be aware of feelings.or may be unable or unwilling to reveal them. Where the depressed patient cannot judge and rate her symptoms accurately, the cost of clinician-rating methods may be justified. Selfratings and clinician-ratings probably reflect different aspects of depression and cannot be expected to have identical results: