Are American psychiatric outpatients more depressed than Chinese outpatients?

Abstract

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.