Am J Psychiatry 1985; 142:1347-1351
Copyright © 1985 by American Psychiatric Association
Are American psychiatric outpatients more depressed than Chinese outpatients?
J Yamamoto, EK Yeh, F Loya, P Slawson and ML Hurwicz
It has often been suggested that Americans tend to seek psychiatric help
for depression, whereas Chinese patients are more likely to have somatic
symptoms of emotional disturbance. When the authors tested this assumption
by studying 99 Taiwanese and 97 American psychiatric outpatients given
computerized diagnoses based on information obtained in a standard
psychiatric interview schedule, they found that the Chinese patients scored
higher on the measures of somatization but also on the measures of
depression.
