The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) is a short self-rating scale composed of 20 items, designed to detect depressive symptomatology. It has demonstrated its sensibility in psychiatric patients and general population. The CES-D was administered to 99 patients, 33 men and 66 women with mean age of 44.14 years. The patients had been diagnosed of: Major Depressive Disorder (74%), Bipolar Disorder (10%), Adaptive Disorder with depressive mood (10%) and other mood disorders (6%) according to DSM-IIIR criteria. In order to study the validity and reliability of the CES-D, we administered the Hamilton Rating Depression Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory and analogical scales to all the patients. In the reliability analysis we obtain 0.9 alpha. The factor analysis show 4 factors who explain the 58.8% of the variance: "depresses Affect/Somatic", "Positive Affect", "Irritability/Hopelessness", "Interpersonal/Social". The scale shows a 0.95 sensibility and 0.91 specificity to depressive symptomatology detection (according to scores equal or over 9 on HRSD) taking as cutoff scores equal or over 16 on CES-D. Our results show that the CES-D is a sensitive and specify tool for depressive symptomatology detection in psychiatric population. The CES-D is easy to be completed and evaluated, therefore may be useful in epidemiologic studies in general populations.