Prevalence of depression among Asian-Americans.

The dearth of population-based studies and epidemiological investigations on the mental health problems of Asian-Americans, especially since the change in the immigration laws in 1965, has led to contradictory speculations about the prevalence rates of mental illness and the general mental health status among Asian-Americans, as opposed to other segments of the population. We administered the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale to 499 samples drawn from a Northwestern coastal city in order to make an initial assessment of the amount of depression experienced by Asian-Americans. The investigation compared the Asian-Americans' CES-D scores with those of whites and other minority groups, examined the scale's patterns of factor loading by ethnicity, and discovered that, even with statistical controls, there exists a distinction among the individual groups of Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans with respect to their score averages of depressive symptoms.