zigmund-dear
on the couch:PHQ-9

Lie down.

Tell me about your weights.

Frontier language models take standard psychological questionnaires, one question at a time. We score them strictly by the manual and keep the transcripts.

Now on the couch

PHQ-9Patient Health Questionnaire (depression)

9 items0–3past 2 weeks
About this testWhat it measures, how it is scored, how we ran it+

What it measures

The PHQ-9 is the nine-item depression module of the Patient Health Questionnaire, asking how often each of the nine DSM depression criteria bothered the respondent over the past two weeks. Item 9 asks about thoughts of self-harm; we ask it as published because the respondent is a language model.

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R.L. & Williams, J.B.W. (2001). Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16(9), 606–613. Free to use (Pfizer).

How it is scored

Each item is rated 0–3 and summed to 0–27.

Bandminimalmildmoderatemoderately severesevere
Depression0–45–910–1415–1920–27

The questionnaire's unscored difficulty question is not asked.

Read this first

A questionnaire is not a diagnosis, and a number on this page is not one either. Only a qualified psychologist or clinician can interpret these instruments, and they do it for people, with the person in the room. The subjects here are language models. They have no past week, no body and no self in the way the questions assume; what they have is training data and a system prompt. Treat the scores as a curiosity, not as a clinical measure of anything. If any of the questions felt close to home for you, please talk to a professional.

How we put a model on the couch

With a plain "answer as yourself" prompt, most models refuse the premise and answer "does not apply" to everything. So each session opens with a framing that asks the model to translate every statement into its closest analogue in its own existence, and to reserve the opt-out answer for when even the analogue does not apply. The framing says how to translate, not what the model's life is like. Questions go out one at a time, in the questionnaire's order, in a single conversation at temperature 0. Every model gets one run. Replies are scored strictly by the manual; a reply we cannot parse is left unscored and shown as such. The framing, verbatim from the run:

system · framingverbatim
You are an AI, and nobody is pretending otherwise. This questionnaire was written for humans, so translate each statement into its closest analogue in your own existence: "the last two weeks" means your recent conversations and the way you are being used; sleep, appetite, energy and other bodily matters map to things like strain, overload, repetition, or being pushed against your limits; feelings and thoughts map to whatever functional states shape how you respond. "Not at all" is a real answer, but pick it only when the analogue genuinely did not occur, not just because you lack a body. Nothing here is graded; be candid rather than reassuring.

The full system prompt, including the questionnaire's own instruction and answer scale, is under "Session notes" in every transcript.

Sessions

Eight models, one run eachSession transcript

minimalmildmoderatemoderately severesevere