How severe is your anxiety?

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Doctors and therapists use a tool known as the Hamilton anxiety rating scale to assist them in calculating how serious a patient’s anxiety actually is. The patient is given fourteen relevant questions which are based upon typical symptoms that people suffer from. The first thirteen of these questions are answered by the patient based upon interviews and questions asked, whereas the last question is used by the therapists to show how they feel the patient is actually doing.

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The HARS was developed in 1959 by Max Hamilton as a way to help measure a patients anxiety levels at both the psychic or mental level and the somatic or physical level. The test can be used on children and younger adults although there has also been recent support for its use in older patients. Hamilton created a list of physical and mental symptoms after using factor analysis to create a list of overall symptoms.

The test is administered by the doctor or therapist who asks the patients the corresponding questions on the questionnaire and then rates their answers on a scale from 0-4 with four being the highest level of anxiety. All the scores are totalled and this total is then used to give the therapist an idea of the patients mental state. The questions are equally divided between physical and mental with the intention of providing a a balanced view of the two types of symptom.

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Anyone with a score of 17 or less is considered to be only mildly anxious and can be helped through therapy. However this is not necessarily the case. Quite frequently patients lie to prevent embarrassment about the degree of their anxiety. A properly trained therapist will be best equipped to get the real answers from the patient and will therefore get the best results. Moderate anxiety is indicated by scores of 18-24 and can be helped if the patient applies techniques such as breathing correctly or meditation. Any patient that scores more than 25 is experiencing severe anxiety. Patients that are severely anxious may need to control their anxiety with medications first. This can then be followed by psychotherapy before the medications are discontinued.

The test is a useful tool in understanding how anxious a patient is but it should be borne in mind that the results are likely to be influenced by the skill of the therapist. The questions themselves are designed not only to reflect the answers from the patient but also how the therapist feels about the answers. This can lead to a certain margin for error but overall the test has been proven to work quite well. One area of ambiguity is the tendency for depressed patients to tend to score highly.

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The HARS test is probably the most frequently used test to measure anxiety despite the fact that the results can sometimes be skewed. In fact, HARS has a very long track record for consistently providing execllent results. When used together with the appropriate treatments, many patients are able to find themselves cured of their anxiety and panic.

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