Assessment and Screening Tools

Screening and assessment tools

On this page you will find links to evidence-based self-assessment tools, developed by academics working in perinatal mental health, to help you identify symptoms of perinatal anxiety.

These tools are designed to help you identify your symptoms, but they are not able to provide you with a clinical diagnosis. The results may be useful in informing how best to help and support women in the perinatal period.

If you wish to use these scales in clinical practice or research, please contact the scale authors directly to obtain permission.

The PASS

The Perinatal Anxiety Screening Scale (PASS) is a questionnaire, consisting of 31 questions designed to screen for potentially problematic anxiety in pregnant and postnatal women.

Ref: Somerville, S. et al. (2014) ‘The Perinatal Anxiety Screening Scale: development and preliminary validation’, Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 17(5),443–454.

Go to the PASS questionnaire

The PrAS

The Pregnancy-related Anxiety Scale (PrAS) is a screening tool, consisting of 33 questions, that is designed to assess the specific anxieties women may be experiencing in relation to their pregnancy.

Ref: Brunton, R. J. et al. (2018) ‘The pregnancy-related anxiety scale: A validity examination using Rasch analysis’, Journal of Affective Disorders, 236, 127–135

Go to the PrAS questionnaire

The PSAS

The Postpartum Specific Anxiety Scale (PSAS) is a questionnaire, consisting of 51 questions, that is designed to assess the specific anxieties women may be feeling in the postnatal period.

Ref: Fallon, V. et al. (2016) ‘The Postpartum Specific Anxiety Scale: development and preliminary validation’. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 19(6), 1079–1090

We have obtained permission from the PSAS authors to make this scale available for women experiencing symptoms. If you would like to use this scale for research/clinical purposes, please contact the PSAS working group directly at v.fallon@liverpool.ac.uk. The scale is available under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence which means that it can’t be used, modified, or commercialised without explicit permission.

Go to the PSAS questionnaire

MORS

The Mothers’ Object Relations Scales are short questionnaire tools that are easy to administer. They are primarily for health practitioners following identification of a possible perinatal mental health difficulty (such as perinatal anxiety), to identify cases where a mother has a maladaptive representation of her infant and to decide on appropriate psychotherapy focused on helping the mother to interpret her infant’s behaviour in a more healthy way. The tool can also be used to track response to therapy.

Go to MORS scales: https://www.morscales.org/