'Indians most depressed': Govt rubbishes WHO study

The Union health ministry on Thursday rejected media reports which cited a World Health Organisation-sponsored study to claim that Indians were the most depressed in the world.

After conducting a thorough analysis of the report titled "Cross-national Epidemiology of DSM-IV Major Depressive

Episode (MDE)", published in BMC Medicine Journal, top health ministry officials on Thursday said the media reports, which suggested that Indians as the most depressed globally, "were gross misprepresentation of the data in the WHO study."

In an elaborate clarification issued on Thursday, the ministry said the lifetime prevalence of depression among Indians, that too among the respondents from Pondicherry (now Puducherry) - the only area covered by the WHO report, was just 9 per cent and not 36 per cent, as claimed by the news reports.

"The reports in the media are based on complete misrepresentation of the facts and picked up after wrongly reading the columns in the survey data," said a ministry release issued in New Delhi.

"The figure of 12 month prevalence (4.5 per cent) and lifetime prevalence (9 per cent) of MDE in India is not representative of the country as this figure is based upon the study data of Puducherry which has different socio-demographic indicators compared to rest of the India. Hence, the findings of the study cannot be generalised to the whole country," the release stated.