Adolescent suicidal behavior and popular self-report instruments of depression, social desirability, and anxiety

Popular self-report inventories of depression, hopelessness, social desirability, and anxiety, along with the Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire, were completed by 150 college students. Tanaka-Matsumi and Kameoka (1986) had questioned the use of popular depression instruments in the assessment of this population, due to the high correlation between depression, anxiety, and social desirability scales. The present experiment also found significant correlations between the self-report instruments and suicidal behaviors. These findings may be due to the fact that anxiety and depression are often found together in clinical settings, and that the content of depression and anxiety scales is not specific to those constructs.