On this page you will find links to three 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 infroming how best to help and support women in the perinatal period.
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.
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
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
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/
