Abstract



Introduction: Depression is one of the most common and important diseases that may affect each person’s lifetime all over the world. Depression may present as a chronic or recurrent type and affects all patient’s daily life activities, personal, and social functions and may end with suicide. Depression affects all ages, genders, and populations. Depression can affect the whole body, and begins with mood, feelings, thinking, and behaviors. In general depression may affect 5% of the population at any time and affects females twice as much as males in adolescence. Depression in the adolescent period has unique characteristics because of its association with major personality changes, identity separation from parents, gender appearance, sexuality, and early decision making. This research aims at evaluating the prevalence of depression in secondary school students in Tikrit city.

Subjects and methods: This is a study in pediatric, and public health nursing and all ethical and administrative agreements were undertaken to conduct the study, from the Ministry of Education, and Department of education in the Tikrit Education Directorate. This is a descriptive study with an analytic component carried out on secondary school, students in Tikrit district. A questionnaire was presented to all students in the schools in the classroom, on one day, depending on the help and cooperation of the school’s administration and teachers during spare time. The students filled out the questionnaires in about 35 minutes after explanation of each item by the researcher and returned them to the researcher at the end of the session.

Results: The study revealed that 31 (19.4%), 19 (11.9%) of males and 91(56.9%), 30 (18.8%) are of females were of moderate and high depression score respectively. The study further revealed that 58 (25.1%), 23 (10%) of Internally Displaced Students (IDPS) were of moderate and high depression score respectively as shown in Table 2. The study revealed that 27 (23.3%), 13 (11.2%) of male IDPS were of moderate and high depression score respectively. The study also revealed that 31 (27%), 10 (8.7%) of females IDPS were of moderate and high depression score respectively.

Conclusions: The study revealed that 58 (25.1%), 23 (10%) of IDPS were of moderate and high depression score respectively. The current study found that the prevalence of depression by using the Columbia scale among secondary schools students aged (12-18) in Tikrit district was 81 (35.1%) %. Gender of the students has a significant effect on the occurrence of depression which is more in females.

Key words: IDPS student, Depression, Epidemiology of Depression in IDPS in Tikrit