GDS-15 PDF: Print the Geriatric Depression Scale
The GDS-15 is a fifteen-question yes or no form, built for older adults, that records how a person has felt over the past week. This page carries the short form itself to print or fill in by hand, with the reverse-scored items marked, the cutoffs and the limits.
Reviewed byMichael Callans, MSWThe fifteen questions
- Are you basically satisfied with your life?
- Have you dropped many of your activities and interests?
- Do you feel that your life is empty?
- Do you often get bored?
- Are you in good spirits most of the time?
- Are you afraid that something bad is going to happen to you?
- Do you feel happy most of the time?
- Do you often feel helpless?
- Do you prefer to stay at home, rather than going out and doing new things?
- Do you feel you have more problems with memory than most?
- Do you think it is wonderful to be alive now?
- Do you feel pretty worthless the way you are now?
- Do you feel full of energy?
- Do you feel that your situation is hopeless?
- Do you think that most people are better off than you are?
How to answer
Choose the best answer for how you have felt over the past week. Write Yes or No beside each of the fifteen questions. There are no right answers, and a quick first response is usually the most accurate. If someone is helping, read each question aloud and record the older adult's own answer, not your impression of it.
The two response options: Yes, No.
How to score it
- Ten questions score a point for Yes: questions 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 and 15.
- Five questions score a point for No, because they are worded positively: questions 1, 5, 7, 11 and 13.
- Add the points. The total runs from 0 to 15, where a higher score means more depressive symptoms reported.
- If a question is missed, the published approach is to prorate: divide the points scored by the number of questions answered, multiply by 15, and round any fraction up. Note on the sheet how many questions were answered.
What the score means
The authors' guidance is that a score above 5 points is suggestive of depression and should prompt a follow-up interview, and that scores above 10 are almost always depression. The scale's own page offers no interpretation beyond that.
Clinical and long-term care settings commonly group the scores further as 0 to 4 normal, 5 to 8 mild, 9 to 11 moderate and 12 to 15 severe. Those bands are conventional shorthand, not the authors' own published grades, and they are not diagnoses.
A positive screen at the usual cutoff of 5 overstates how many people turn out to have depression when a full clinical interview is done, so treat it as a reason for an appointment rather than a confirmed case. The GDS-15 also does not assess suicide risk. Any answer pointing to hopelessness, worthlessness or not feeling life is worth living deserves a direct, caring follow-up question straight away, whatever the total.
Source and permission
Geriatric Depression Scale, short form. Sheikh JI, Yesavage JA. Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS): recent evidence and development of a shorter version. Clinical Gerontologist. 1986;5(1-2):165-173. doi:10.1300/J018v05n01_09.
Original scale: Yesavage JA, Brink TL, Rose TL, Lum O, Huang V, Adey M, Leirer VO. Development and validation of a geriatric depression screening scale: a preliminary report. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 1982-1983;17(1):37-49. doi:10.1016/0022-3956(82)90033-4. Brink TL, Yesavage JA, Lum O, Heersema P, Adey M, Rose TL. Screening tests for geriatric depression. Clinical Gerontologist. 1982;1(1):37-43.
The scale and its translations are available free from the authors at https://web.stanford.edu/~yesavage/GDS.html.
Reproduced because the authors state on their own Stanford page that the original scale is in the public domain, partly as a result of federal support, and the fifteen short-form questions are a subset of that original scale distributed from the same page.
Related tools & tests
Worried about an older adult's mood?
Depression in later life is treatable, and therapists who work with older adults are listed in our directory. Free to search.
Therapists Who Work With Depression
A worksheet is a start. These licensed therapists work with the same problem; every member is matched to the federal NPI Registry and board checks are dated on the profile.
-
View profile
Dharele LewisLMSW, LCSW
License verified, checked Sep 28, 2026
“Humans Helping Humans. Together, we'll make room for what hurts and work toward meaningful change with compassion first.”
Southfield, Michigan Telehealth and in person $220 per session, sliding scale
-
View profile
Dr. Anthony FiorePh.D,
License verified, checked Oct 19, 2026
“I work with individuals and couples who struggle with anger, marriage on the brink, or need help with communication skills.”
Mission Viejo, California Telehealth $150 to $200 per session
-
View profile
License verified, checked Oct 28, 2026
“You’re the one everyone leans on, but who’s there for you? Find compassionate therapy for anxiety, trauma, burnout, and motherhood. You deserve support, too.”
Palos Heights, Illinois Telehealth $225 to $350 per session
About this tool
The GDS-15 PDF on this page is the short form of the Geriatric Depression Scale: fifteen questions, each answered Yes or No, about how a person has felt over the past week. The total runs from 0 to 15, where higher means more depressive symptoms reported. It is built for older adults, generally sixty and over, and the questions sound different from most mood questionnaires on purpose. They ask about satisfaction with life, feeling empty, boredom, helplessness, memory, worthlessness and hope, rather than about frequencies and symptom counts.
Yesavage, Brink, Rose and colleagues developed the original thirty-item scale and reported it in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 1982. Their design problem was specific: existing depression measures leaned heavily on physical symptoms, which are unreliable signals in older adults because illness, medication and ordinary aging produce them too. They assembled a hundred candidate items, tested them and kept the thirty that best separated depressed from non-depressed older adults. Sheikh and Yesavage then published the fifteen-item short form in Clinical Gerontologist in 1986, selecting the items that correlated most strongly with depressive symptoms in the original validation.
The yes or no format is the other deliberate choice. A four-point frequency scale, of the kind the PHQ-9 uses, asks a person to hold several options in mind, weigh them against each other and commit. That is harder work than it looks when someone is tired, in pain, hard of hearing, visually impaired or mildly cognitively impaired, and harder still when a tired respondent simply picks the middle column. A binary question can be read aloud across a bed and answered in a word, and a quick first response is usually more accurate here than a considered one.
Notice what the fifteen questions do not ask about: sleep, appetite, weight, libido or aches. Those are the standard somatic items of a depression screen, and in an eighty-year-old with arthritis, a diuretic and a bad hip they are nearly useless as evidence of mood, because they will be positive whether or not depression is present. The GDS instead asks about the psychological and social texture of the week. That is why the scale remains in use decades after it was written, in clinics, hospital wards, home care and long-term care.
On interpretation, the authors' own guidance is narrow: a score above 5 points is suggestive of depression and should prompt a follow-up interview, and scores above 10 are almost always depression. The further grading you will see in many clinical settings, with 0 to 4 called normal, 5 to 8 mild, 9 to 11 moderate and 12 to 15 severe, is conventional shorthand rather than the authors' published grades. At the usual cutoff of 5, a positive screen considerably overstates how many people turn out to have depression on a full interview, so it is a reason for an appointment, not a finding.
The scale has a real boundary, and it is cognitive. Conradsson and colleagues studied the GDS-15 in a population aged eighty-five and over in 2013 and concluded it was useful for people with a Mini-Mental State Examination score of 10 or more, called for more validation in the 10 to 14 range, and said other measures are needed below 10. Completion rates told the same story: most people scoring 10 or above on the MMSE could finish the scale, while very few below that could. Where dementia is more advanced, observer-rated tools such as the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia are the usual alternative.
Two further limits are worth stating plainly. The GDS-15 does not assess suicide risk: none of the fifteen questions asks about it directly, so a low total is no reassurance on that point, and any answer touching on hopelessness, worthlessness or life not being worth living deserves a direct, caring follow-up question straight away. And a high score names nothing about cause. Bereavement, chronic pain, a thyroid problem, vitamin B12 deficiency, a new medication, hearing loss that has quietly cut someone off from conversation, or plain isolation can all raise it. So can depression, which is not a normal part of getting older and is treatable at any age.
A memory question sits inside the scale, which trips people up. Item 10 asks whether the person feels they have more problems with memory than most, and a Yes scores a point toward depression. That is not an error: depression in later life often shows up as poor concentration and genuine difficulty recalling things, and it is one of the reasons depression and early dementia are confused for each other. If memory is the main worry rather than mood, the screen at Memory & Dementia Concern Screen covers that ground, and a clinician will often look at both together.
Print the sheet and circle fifteen answers for the past week. If you are helping someone else, read each question aloud and write down their answer, not your impression of it, and resist the urge to correct or qualify what they say. If you would rather answer on screen and have the reverse-scored items handled for you, the interactive version is at Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15). For an adult under sixty, or for tracking severity over time, the questionnaire at Depression Test is the more common choice.
References
- Yesavage JA, Brink TL, Rose TL, Lum O, Huang V, Adey M, Leirer VO. Development and validation of a geriatric depression screening scale: a preliminary report. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 1982;17(1):37-49. doi:10.1016/0022-3956(82)90033-4
- Sheikh JI, Yesavage JA. Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS): recent evidence and development of a shorter version. Clinical Gerontologist. 1986;5(1-2):165-173. doi:10.1300/J018v05n01_09
- Conradsson M, Rosendahl E, Littbrand H, Gustafson Y, Olofsson B, Lovheim H. Usefulness of the Geriatric Depression Scale 15-item version among very old people with and without cognitive impairment. Aging & Mental Health. 2013;17(5):638-645. doi:10.1080/13607863.2012.758231
- Yesavage JA. Geriatric Depression Scale: scale, short form and translations. Stanford University. Accessed November 2026. https://web.stanford.edu/~yesavage/GDS.html
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, November 6). GDS-15 PDF. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/gds-15-pdf
GDS-15 PDF FAQ
Is the GDS-15 PDF free to download?
Yes. The GDS-15 is free, and the authors state on their own Stanford page that the Geriatric Depression Scale is in the public domain, partly because its development received federal support. The fifteen short-form questions are a subset of the original thirty and are distributed from that same page, along with translations into many languages. There is nothing to buy and no registration. Anyone reprinting it should leave the item wording as published, because the scoring key, including which five questions score a point for No, only applies to those exact questions.
How do I score the GDS-15?
The GDS-15 has a split key, which is where most hand-scoring errors come from. Ten questions score one point for a Yes answer: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 and 15. The other five are worded positively and score one point for No: questions 1, 5, 7, 11 and 13. Add the points for a total between 0 and 15. If a question was missed, the published approach is to prorate, dividing the points scored by the number answered, multiplying by 15 and rounding any fraction up, and noting on the sheet how many questions were answered.
What is a normal GDS-15 score?
On the GDS-15 the authors treat anything above 5 as suggestive of depression and worth a follow-up interview, and scores above 10 as almost always depression, so 0 to 4 is the range usually described as normal. Be careful with the word, though. These bands describe how many depressive symptoms a person reported over one week, and a screen set at 5 deliberately errs toward catching cases, which means a fair number of people who score 6 or 7 will not turn out to have depression when a clinician asks properly. A 6 is a reason to ask, not an answer.
Why does the GDS-15 not ask about sleep or appetite?
That omission is the main design idea behind the GDS. Standard depression questionnaires lean on physical symptoms such as poor sleep, appetite change, low energy and aches, and in older adults those signals are badly contaminated: arthritis, heart failure, diuretics, pain and ordinary aging produce them whether or not depression is present. Yesavage and colleagues built the scale around the psychological and social experience of the week instead, asking about emptiness, boredom, helplessness, worth and hope. It is less complete as a symptom inventory and considerably more specific as a screen in this age group.
Can the GDS-15 be used with someone who has memory problems?
Up to a point. Conradsson and colleagues found in 2013 that the GDS-15 was useful among people aged eighty-five and over with a Mini-Mental State Examination score of 10 or above, asked for more validation in the 10 to 14 range, and concluded that other measures are needed below 10, where very few people could complete it at all. In practice that means mild cognitive impairment is usually workable, moderate impairment calls for caution, and in more advanced dementia an observer-rated instrument such as the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia is the usual alternative.
Should I use the GDS-15 or the PHQ-9?
The GDS-15 is the better fit when the person is older, frail, in pain or living with several medical conditions, because it does not count physical symptoms that illness would produce anyway, and because fifteen yes or no questions are easier to answer than a grid of frequency columns. The PHQ-9 is usually preferred for adults under sixty, when severity has to be tracked numerically across appointments, or when a care program is set up around its 0 to 27 scale. Both are free, and some clinicians use the GDS-15 to screen and the PHQ-9 to monitor.
Does the GDS-15 diagnose depression?
No. The GDS-15 is a screening aid, and the authors describe a score above 5 as a prompt for a follow-up interview, not as a result. A clinician still has to work out what is behind the answers: a recent bereavement, chronic pain, a thyroid problem, vitamin B12 deficiency, a new medication, untreated hearing loss, isolation, early dementia, or depression itself. Nor does the scale ask about suicide risk at all, so a low total is no reassurance on that point. What the sheet does well is turn a worry about someone into fifteen specific answers a doctor can work with.