Brief report
Depression in Asian–American and Caucasian undergraduate students

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Abstract

Background

Depression is a serious and often under-diagnosed and undertreated mental health problem in college students which may have fatal consequences. Little is known about ethnic differences in prevalence of depression in US college campuses. This study compares depression severity in Asian–American and Caucasian undergraduate students at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Methods

Participants completed the nine item Patient Health Questionnaire and key demographic information via an anonymous online questionnaire.

Results

Compared to Caucasians, Asian–Americans exhibited significantly elevated levels of depression. Furthermore, Korean–American students were significantly more depressed than Chinese–American, other minority Asian–American, and Caucasian students. In general, females were significantly more depressed than males. Results were upheld when level of acculturation was considered.

Limitations

The demographic breakdown of the student population at UCSD is not representative to that of the nation.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that outreach to female and Asian–American undergraduate students is important and attention to Korean–American undergraduates may be especially worthwhile.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 2427 people viewed the consent form and/or began the questionnaire. Those who did not consent, indicated more than one (sub)ethnicity, or did not respond to the gender and ethnicity items were excluded. The remaining sample (N = 1837) consisted of 1251 Asian–American (869F, 382M) and 586 Caucasian (410F, 176M) undergraduate students (M = 20.32, SD = 1.93 years) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The Asian–American group was further subdivided into groups of Chinese (N = 605),

Results

Fig. 1 illustrates the raw PHQ-9 score for each ethnicity and gender. Raw PHQ-9 scores were normalized through a square root transformation. A two-factor (2 ethnicity × 2 gender) ANOVA indicated significantly greater depression severity amongst Asian–Americans as compared to Caucasians, F(1, 1764) = 10.340, p = 0.001, and significantly more severe depression in females as compared to males, F(1, 1764) = 11.013, p = 0.001. There was no significant interaction between ethnicity and gender on depression

Discussion

The hypothesis regarding ethnic differences in depression was not supported while the hypothesis regarding gender differences was confirmed. Overall, Asian–Americans experienced more grave depression than Caucasians. In addition, Korean–Americans were significantly more depressed than Chinese–Americans, other Asian–Americans and Caucasians. As hypothesized, female students exhibited greater depression severity than their male counterparts.

Role of funding source

Funding for this study was provided by the John A. Majda, MD Memorial Fund. The Foundation had no further role in study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors do not have any interests that may be interpreted as influencing the research.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Shahrokh Golshan, PhD for his statistical advice and guidance. The authors would also like to acknowledge support from the UCSD Foundation and the John A. Majda, MD Memorial Fund.

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