SRQ-20: the World Health Organization common distress screenSRQ-20
~4 min · 20 questions · Free partial report
This test contains sensitive content. Results are private and not shared with employers unless you explicitly consent.
Twenty yes or no questions about the last 30 days, and the striking thing is what they mix. Feeling unhappy, nervous or unable to decide sits in the same list as headaches, poor sleep, a bad stomach, shaking hands and tiredness that does not lift. That is deliberate. The World Health Organization built the Self Reporting Questionnaire in the 1970s for general health care in countries where a specialist was rarely available, after a study across Colombia, India, Senegal and Sudan found that roughly one patient in seven arrived with a mental disorder and that two thirds of them left unnoticed. Distress in most of the world announces itself in the body first, so the body is in the questionnaire rather than beside it. Your score is the number of yes answers, from 0 to 20. There is no universal line to cross: the World Health Organization states that no global cutoff can be recommended and that each study has to set its own, so this test reports where your score sits against the range of cutoffs that have actually been published, each one with the country and the sample it came from.
Twenty yes or no questions about the last 30 days, mood and body in the same list, and a World Health Organization screen that refuses to publish a universal cutoff.
- Get a structured count of how much common distress you have carried over the last month, in the instrument public health services have used for that since the 1980s, and see where that count sits against the cutoffs the literature has published rather than against one line invented for you. You get the 0 to 20 score, its position relative to the lowest and the highest published thresholds, and the Brazilian and Eritrean cutoffs quoted with their populations and their sensitivity and specificity, so you can see how much the answer depends on which study you apply.
No signup required to start. The Partial Report is free at the end. The Complete costs $9.90, if and when you want it.
What this test measures
Common mental distress
How many of twenty common complaints you reported over the last 30 days, on a 0 to 20 count. The list mixes what most screeners keep apart: mood and worry sit next to headaches, poor sleep, poor appetite, a bad stomach and shaking hands, because in general health care those arrive together and the World Health Organization built the questionnaire for that setting. Higher means more complaints reported. There is no universal line to cross: the source states that no global cutoff can be recommended and that each study has to set its own, so the score is a position on a continuum of distress rather than a verdict, and never a diagnosis.
Below every published cutoff
Inside the published cutoff range
At or above every published cutoff
Your result falls into one of these bands.
Discover where you stand on each dimension.
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The process is simple: you respond, the system calculates, and the result appears. No prior signup, no form, no waiting.
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Click "Start for free"
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Answer the questions
Yes or no, for each of twenty questions about the last 30 days. Visible progress bar. You can pause and resume from any device after identifying yourself.
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| Free and paid, side by side | Partial Report (free, always) | Complete Report ($9.90) |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Raw score for each dimension | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-paragraph overview reading | ✓ | ✓ |
| Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension | — | ✓ |
| Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms | — | ✓ |
| Inter-dimensional chart with accessible data table | — | ✓ |
| Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care | — | ✓ |
| Certificate with public verification and PDF download | — | ✓ |
- ✓Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension
- ✓Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms
- ✓Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care
- ✓Certificate with public verification and PDF download
You only pay after completing the test, if you want to go beyond the Partial.
- ✓Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers
- ✓Raw score for each dimension
- ✓One-paragraph overview reading
- ✓Free trial of the Integrative Chat, unlocked by your first test
Payment via PIX (instant) or credit card. Access for 1 year. After that, the report stays visible in read-only mode.
Why trust this instrument.
The SRQ-20 (World Health Organization, 1994, WHO/MNH/PSF/94.8) screens for common mental distress with twenty yes or no questions about the last 30 days. Yes scores 1 and no scores 0, so the total is a plain count from 0 to 20. One scale, no subscales, no reverse-keyed items. The list deliberately mixes mood and thinking items with somatic ones, because the instrument was built for general health care in settings where distress arrives as headaches and bad sleep before it arrives as a mood word. Item 17 asks about thoughts of ending one's life, which is why the test is flagged as sensitive. There is no norm set and, unusually, no cutoff either: the guide states that no global, generally applicable cutoff can be recommended and that each study should determine its own, and its own review table spans published thresholds from 3/4 to 11/12. Rather than pick one and dress it as the World Health Organization's, the bands here report position against that published range, and every individual cutoff quoted in the report carries the country, the sample and the study it came from. English is the version the World Health Organization published, reproduced verbatim, and the guide is marked English only. Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian are NOESIS translations of the English original, not reviewed or approved by the World Health Organization: German and Italian because the Organization holds no version of either, and the other three because the Organization stated that it would not supply the versions it does hold and expressly allowed ours instead, provided they are identified as ours.
- Authors:
- Harding et al.; Beusenberg & Orley (compilers)
- Year:
- 1994
- Range
- α 0.86 – 0.86(1 scales)
- Average
- α 0.86(good)
Cronbach's alpha. Values above .70 are acceptable; above .80, good.
- Beusenberg, M., & Orley, J. (compilers) (1994). A User's Guide to the Self Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ). Geneva: World Health Organization, Division of Mental Health. WHO/MNH/PSF/94.8. Harding, T. W., de Arango, M. V., Baltazar, J., Climent, C. E., Ibrahim, H. H. A., Ladrido-Ignacio, L., Murthy, R. S., & Wig, N. N. (1980). Mental disorders in primary health care: a study of their frequency and diagnosis in four developing countries. Psychological Medicine, 10(2), 231-241.
The theory behind this test.
Common Mental Disorders in Primary Care
Framework that treats anxious, depressive and bodily complaints as one field rather than as separate diagnoses. It came out of the World Health Organization's collaborative study on extending mental health care through primary care, which found in four developing countries that roughly one patient in seven arrived with a mental disorder and that two thirds of those went unnoticed by the staff seeing them. The response was to stop asking which disorder and start asking whether there is distress at all, in language a general health worker could use without specialist training. Two consequences follow from that design. Bodily complaints belong in the measure rather than beside it, because in most of the world distress arrives as headaches, poor sleep and a bad stomach before it arrives as a mood word. And there is no universal threshold: what counts as a probable case depends on the language, the population and what the screening is for, so a number here is a position on a continuum of distress, never a diagnosis.
Learn more about this theory →Target Audience
Adults who have felt off for a while without being able to name it, and anyone whose distress has been showing up as headaches, bad sleep and a bad stomach rather than as a mood they would call by name.
Recommended ages: 18+
Questions the report answers.
How much common distress did the last 30 days carry?
The score is a count, not a grade, and the useful reading is in two parts. First, position: published cutoffs for this questionnaire run from 3/4 at the most sensitive to 11/12 at the least, so below 4 is under every line anyone has published and 12 or more is at or above all of them. In between, the answer genuinely depends on which study you apply, and the World Health Organization declines to choose for you. Second, composition: look at whether your yes answers cluster in the bodily items (headaches, appetite, sleep, digestion, stomach, shaking, tiredness) or in the mood and thinking ones (unhappy, crying, no interest, worthless, cannot decide, cannot enjoy). The count treats them the same, but they point at different conversations. If question 17 is among your yes answers, that one stands on its own and is worth acting on today regardless of the total.
Who benefits most.
Someone whose symptoms are physical
Headaches, a stomach that is never quite right, sleep that does not restore, hands that shake, tiredness that rest does not fix. Tests are usually clear and nothing turns up. This questionnaire puts those complaints in the same list as mood and worry on purpose, which is what makes it able to see a pattern that a depression screen asking only about mood would miss.
Someone who wants a wide net rather than a named condition
The other screens on this platform ask about one thing: depression, anxiety, stress. This one deliberately refuses to name a condition and asks whether there is distress at all. If you do not know which door to knock on, a single count across twenty complaints is a more useful place to start than guessing which specific screen applies to you.
Someone tracking a rough stretch
The window is 30 days and the score is a plain count, which makes two readings taken a couple of months apart genuinely comparable. One number says little. The difference between two says whether the stretch is passing.
Frequently asked questions
If there is no cutoff, what does my score actually mean?
It means how many of the twenty complaints you reported over the last 30 days, and the refusal to fix a line is the source's position rather than something missing here. The World Health Organization guide states that no global, generally applicable cutoff can be recommended for the SRQ and that each study should determine its own, because the right threshold depends on the language, on how the questionnaire is given, on the population answering it and on what the screening is for. Published cutoffs range from 3/4 to 11/12 across the studies in the guide's own table, which is a wide enough spread that picking one and calling it the World Health Organization's would be a fabrication. So this test tells you where you sit against that range, and it quotes the individual lines with the population each came from. The best known is Brazil's 7/8, from primary care in Sao Paulo and confirmed later against a structured clinical interview, which means eight or more counted as a probable case in those samples. Yours may not be one of those samples.
Question 17 asks about thoughts of ending my life. What happens to that answer?
It is scored like the other nineteen, one point, and it is not reported to anyone. Nothing on this platform is monitored by a person and nothing here triggers a call. That is worth knowing precisely, because it also means the questionnaire cannot help you in the moment. If that thought is present, it is not a data point to average with headaches and appetite: contact a professional, someone you trust, or an emergency service where you live, today. The item is in the instrument because the World Health Organization put it there and removing it would change the score, and it is the single clearest reason this test is flagged as sensitive.
Does the World Health Organization endorse NOESIS?
No, and it is worth stating plainly. The World Health Organization granted NOESIS written permission to reproduce the SRQ-20 on this platform, under Permission Request No. MRR-048859. Permission to use an instrument is not approval of the platform that uses it. The World Health Organization does not endorse, sponsor, certify or recommend NOESIS, its reports or its other tests, and it has not reviewed any of them. What comes from the World Health Organization is the questionnaire and its scoring rule. Everything else on this page is ours, including the decision about how to report a score with no cutoff.
Which of these six languages is the World Health Organization's text, and which is yours?
One is theirs and five are ours. The English questionnaire is the one printed in the World Health Organization guide, reproduced word for word, and the guide's own title page carries the mark English only. Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian are NOESIS translations of that English text. The World Health Organization did not write them, did not review them and did not approve them, and it takes no responsibility for their accuracy. The English version is the authentic text, which is what settles any difference between languages. We say the same on the instruction screen before you start and in the copyright notice beside the questionnaire, because a translation nobody authenticated should not be able to pass for one that was.
Why are the Portuguese, Spanish and French versions yours and not the World Health Organization's?
Because we asked for theirs and were told to write our own. The preface of the WHO user's guide lists Portuguese, Spanish and French as available on request from the division that held them, and the permission we operate under requires the official translation to be used as published wherever one exists. So we wrote and asked. The answer, which forms part of that same permission, is that WHO will not supply the pending versions and that we may use translations prepared by NOESIS, provided they are clearly identified as NOESIS translations and are never presented as official WHO translations or as translations reviewed, approved or endorsed by WHO. English remains the authentic source text. If WHO later identifies an official version in any of these languages, ours is replaced by it.
Who can see my results?
This test is flagged as sensitive in NOESIS. Your results belong to you. If you ever take it inside a corporate program, individual results of sensitive tests are never shown to your employer without your explicit per-test consent, which defaults to off. That is a platform rule, not a courtesy. A mental health screen has no place in a hiring decision either, which is why this test is marked unsuitable for recruitment.
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The Complete costs $9.90, if and when you want it.
This test is a self-knowledge tool for informational purposes. It does not constitute a psychological or clinical diagnosis and does not replace evaluation by a qualified professional. The report indicates the AI model used in text generation.
The SRQ-20 is copyright World Health Organization. The items and the scoring are reproduced from A User's Guide to the Self Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ), compiled by M. Beusenberg and J. Orley, Geneva, World Health Organization, Division of Mental Health, 1994 (WHO/MNH/PSF/94.8), whose rights page reserves all rights to the Organization and allows reproduction and translation but not sale or use for commercial purposes. NOESIS reproduces the instrument commercially under written permission from the World Health Organization, Permission Request No. MRR-048859. Languages are not all the same here, and the difference matters. English is the version the World Health Organization published, reproduced without modification, and the guide itself is marked English only. Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian are NOESIS translations of the English original: the World Health Organization did not write them, did not review them and did not approve them, it takes no responsibility for their accuracy, and the English version is the authentic text. Nothing in those five languages is an official World Health Organization translation or a translation it reviewed, approved or endorsed. If the World Health Organization identifies an official version in any of those five languages, that version replaces ours. The World Health Organization does not endorse, sponsor, certify or recommend NOESIS, this platform, its other assessments or its interpretations, and this permission is not an endorsement, certification or accreditation. Results obtained here are not a clinical diagnosis and do not replace assessment by a professional.