Assessment of depression in Kuwait by principal component analysis.

One hundred depressed inpatients were examined by the WHO schedule for Standardized Assessment of Depressive Disorders (SADD). A common core of symptoms is shared with patients in other studies from Western, Middle-Eastern and international studies. However, pathoplastic cultural influences are manifest in a number of symptoms, notable among which are metaphorical descriptions of symptom intensity by the overwhelmed patient, infrequency of feelings of hopelessness and suicidal attempts, masking of guilt feelings by a front of somatization and a linkage of body weight and sexual functions to health in general. Evidence is provided for a continuum-type unimodal distribution of the principal components studied.