Depressive symptoms in patients and normal subjects in India.

A survey of symptomatology of depressed patients and normal subjects in India was conducted, using a previously developed operational definition for depressive disorders that had been converted into a Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS). Results obtained from 430 depressed and 97 normal subjects showed that depressed patients scored significantly higher on 18 of the 20 individual items of the SDS, as well as the SDS index, than did normal subjects (P= less than .01). Correlation between the physician's global rating of the patient's depression and patient's own self-rating was 0.74 (P= less than .01). A comparison of these results in India with those previously obtained in the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, England, Germany, and the Netherlands showed that depressed patients scored similarly in all the countries studied.