Bereket Beyene Gebre, Zebene Mekonnen and Asres Bedaso
Background: Depression is the most common mental disorder. It is a major cause of disability across the world. Depression can affect everyone and is not an exclusive disease.
Objective: This study was designed to assess magnitude and associated factors of depression among Mizan- Aman College of health Science students from March 1-30, 2017.
Methods: An institution based cross sectional quantitative study was conducted on 328 college students and the subjects were identified by simple random sampling techniques after stratified by department with proportional sample allocation. Patient Health Questionnaires-9 (PHQ-9) is an instrument used to measure magnitude of depression and its associated factors. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used and data were edited, coded and entered using Epi data version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 21 for analysis. Then the independent variables were identified by forward binary logistic regression.
Results: The mean age of the respondents were 20.50 years (SD=3.078). The prevalence of depression was 34.1%. From those depressed; 88 (26.83%), 22 (6.71%) and 2 (0.61%) had mild, moderate and severe depression respectively. According to this study, family history of depression, interest to learn in the department and presence of other disease (dyspepsia, malaria, headache were found to be significantly associated with depression among health science students.
Conclusion: The prevalence of depression in this study was relatively high. Therefore the college should provide counselling and advice for students on the independent predictors of depression.