Abstract

The short version of Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS-21, Lovibond y Lovibond, 1995) has been shown to have appropriate psychometric properties among Chilean adolescents and undergraduates. The current study was aimed at determining the cut-off scores of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS-21) for screening Chilean youngsters at risk of mental health problems and requiring mental health treatment. The sample comprised 393 non-patients youngsters aged 15-24 and 77 youngsters at early stage of psychotherapy. The presence of symptoms was used as gold standard for estimating the cut-off betWeen non-symptomatic youngsters and symptomatic patients. Receiving Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses allowed examining accuracy of each scale and sensitivity and specificity analysis was performed for determining the cut-off points. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) was higher than 0.9 for each scale of the DASS-21. The optimal cut-off score for the Depression scale was 6 and above, which resulted in sensitivity=88, 46 and specificity=86, 77, and a cut-off of 5 and above was optimal for the anxiety scale, with a sensitivity of 87, 50 and specificity of 83, 38.The Stress Scale had sensitivity of 81, 48 and specificity of 71, 36 at the optimal cut-off score of 6 and above. These findings suggest that the DASS-21 performs adequately as a screening tool to identify Chilean young people at risk of mental health problems.