Depression severity

Interesting post on neuroskeptic about the HAMD:

"The APA use the terminology "Very Severe", which doesn't even appear on other scales...But where did the APA get their system from? This is the most extraordinary thing. Here's the paper they based their approach on. It's an 1982 British study by Kearns et al...You'll recognize the APA's categories, kind of, but they're all shifted. Why? We can only guess. Here's my guess. The scores in that Kearns et al graph were the average HAMD scores of people who fell into each severity band. The APA must have decided that they could use these to create cutoffs for severity."