Postpsychotic Depression-Reply

In Reply.—  Dr Prakash is correct in his statement that the HDS was originally developed to measure change in depressive symptoms among patients who had already received the diagnosis of depression. However, the scale has been widely used as a diagnostic aid, with a range of cutoff scores used to define patient groups. Thus, our use, as indicated in the original article, is not without some scientific precedent. Further, in agreement with Dr Prakash, we recognize that the HDS may not be the best measure of depressive symptoms in schizophrenic patients. For this reason, we also examined ratings of depressive mood obtained from the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale and looked at HDS scores, deleting items such as work and activities that might have been affected by schizophrenic deficits rather than specific depressive features. Results with these measures were congruent with those obtained with the HDS.The many variations of the HDS are