Prevalence of depressive symptoms and associated factors among young men living in Soweto

The global high prevalence of depression among males often goes undiagnosed and untreated, which may explain the high suicide rates among men. Despite this, not adequate attention is paid to this public health challenge, thus, this study was aimed at determining the prevalence and associated fac-tors of depression among young men living in Soweto. A cross-sectional quantitative design was used to screen for depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) among 405 young men. STATA-14 was used to analyze the data with the use of Pearson chi-square test of association and logistic regression to explore associations between socio-demographic variables with depressive symptoms (p-value≤0.05). The majority of the participants were single (n=345, 85.19%), unemployed (n=259, 63.95%), and used alcohol (n=325, 80.25 %). The prevalence of depression was 39.26%, with most exhibiting mild to moderate symptoms. The use of alcohol and employment status of the young men were significantly associated with symptoms of depression. The high prevalence of depres-sion among young men detected in this study indicates the need to pay attention to the mental health of this group of society, and to implement gender-specific interventions for the early diagnosis, pre-vention and treatment of depression.