Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD): some psychometric data for a Swedish sample

The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD) was evaluated in a Swedish population sample. The purpose of the study was to compare the HAD with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Spielberger's State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). A secondary aim was to examine the factor structure of the HAD. The results indicated that the factor structure was quite strong, consistently showing two factors in the whole sample as well as in different subsamples, The correlations between the total HAD scale and BDI and STAI, respectively, were stronger than those obtained using the different subscales of the HAD (the anxiety and depression subscales). As expected, there was also a stronger correlation between the HAD and the non-physical items of the BDI. It was somewhat surprising that the factor analyses were consistently extracting two factors, 'depression' and 'anxiety', while on the other hand both BDI and STAI tended to correlate more strongly with the total HAD score than with the specific depression and anxiety HAD subscales. Nevertheless, the HAD appeared to be (as was indeed originally intended) a useful clinical indicator of the possibility of depression and clinical anxiety.