BPRS Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale Calculator

What it measures

The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) is an 18-item, clinician-rated scale of psychiatric symptom severity. Ratings cover the past week and are based on observed behavior and the patient's verbal report. The items are somatic concern, anxiety, emotional withdrawal, conceptual disorganization, guilt feelings, tension, mannerisms and posturing, grandiosity, depressive mood, hostility, suspiciousness, hallucinatory behavior, motor retardation, uncooperativeness, unusual thought content, blunted affect, excitement and disorientation. Each item in the tool shows its anchor definition, including what should and should not be counted. It is not a substitute for a full clinical evaluation.

Items and scoring

Each item is rated 0 (Not Assessed), 1 (Not Present), 2 (Very Mild), 3 (Mild), 4 (Moderate), 5 (Moderately Severe), 6 (Severe) or 7 (Extremely Severe). The total is the sum of all items. Because a rated item scores at least 1, the effective total is 18 to 126 once every item is rated. The tool shows a severity label only after all 18 items have a rating.

Total	Severity label	Meaning given by the tool
1–30	Below Mild	Below the Leucht et al. mildly ill anchor; interpret with clinical interview
31–40	Mildly Ill	Approximately corresponds to CGI mildly ill
41–52	Moderately Ill	Approximately corresponds to CGI moderately ill
53–126	Markedly Ill or Worse	Approximately corresponds to CGI markedly ill or greater

These anchors (mildly ill about 31, moderately ill about 41, markedly ill about 53) come from Leucht and colleagues' 2005 linking of BPRS totals to Clinical Global Impression ratings.

Subscales

The tool also totals five item groups: Positive Symptoms (items 4, 8, 11, 12, 15), Negative Symptoms (3, 13, 16), Affective Symptoms (2, 5, 9), Activation (6, 7, 17) and Other (1, 10, 14, 18). These are site groupings for convenience, not a published factor model, so use them to track change in one patient rather than to compare with research norms.

What the report includes

Copy Report places a plain-text summary on the clipboard with the date, every item score and its label, the five subscale totals, the total with its severity label and interpretation (or a note that not all items are rated), the scoring note and two references: Overall JE, Gorham DR. Psychol Rep. 1962;10(3):799-812, and Leucht S, Kane JM, Kissling W, Hamann J, Etschel E, Engel R. Br J Psychiatry. 2005;187:366-371. Reset clears all ratings after a confirmation.