The authors developed a depression scale in the Vietnamese language that contains culturally consistent items describing the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of depressed individuals and items describing common clinical characteristics of depressed Vietnamese patients. After pretesting, the preliminary 43-item scale was given to 21 depressed Vietnamese patients and a matched community sample of 44. Fifteen items accounted for 96% of the variance between the two groups and were used as the final form of the Vietnamese Depression Scale. A cutoff of 13 points (of a possible 34) identified 91% of the patients and 96% of the community sample.