Depression and its socio-demographic correlates among urban slum dwellers of North India: A cross-sectional study

Background: Depression is a common mental health disorder that is characterized by loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration, insomnia or hypersomnia, and occasionally suicidal thoughts. Apart from biological factors, sociocultural factors also play a key role in development of depression. Objectives: To determine the prevalence of depression in the study population and to study various socio-demographic correlates of depression in the study population. Methods: A community based cross-sectional study was carried out in an urban slum area of Rohtak city during 2016-2017. A total of 600 study participants were selected and interviewed by using PHQ-9 depression scale. The collected data were entered in MS Excel spread sheet and analysed using SPSS software version 20.0. Results: Mean age of the study participants was 37.91 ± 11.75 years. Almost all (97.5 %) study subjects were Hindu. Majority (52 %) belonged to General category. Overall prevalence of depression was found to be 16.2%. The distribution for factors like gender, marital status, education, occupation, socioeconomic status, type of family, living arrangement, smoking habit and death of close relatives were found to be statistically significant with depression (P<0.05). Logistic regression analysis showed that female gender, divorce/separation, illiteracy, unemployment, lower socioeconomic class nuclear family living alone, smoking habit, presence of chronic morbidity and death of close relative in past one year, as independent predictors of depression. Conclusions: The prevalence of depression among adults in an urban slum of north India was found to be 16.2%. Our findings indicate that depression in urban slum is significantly associated with determinants such as gender marital status, education, occupation, SE class, family type, smoking, living arrangement, death of close relative, chronic morbidities like neurological disorders, diabetes and hypertension.