Depression Among Asian Americans: A Literature Review

1. Introduction
Depression is a common mental health disorder in modern society. According to Kroenke citing WHO, “The World Health Organization now recognizes depression as one of the most burdensome diseases in the world.” (World Health Organization, 2002 as cited by Kroenke et al., 2009)
Kim et al. referring to Yang et al. state that the prevalence of Major Depressive Disorder among Asian Americans is moderate to low. (Yang et al 2007 as cited by Kim et al, 2015). However, this does not mean that the rate of people having depressive symptom in this population is low . Per Chung et al, even though 41.6% of the Asian American patients in their study sample population have depressive symptoms, yet only 23.6% of Asian American patients’ symptoms

For first generation Chinese Americans living in Chinatown, on one hand they have to adapt to the American culture at least to some extent, on the other hand they have to retain their Chinese culture. How one identifies with each culture, and how one deals with the culture shock and culture conflict could shape how one feels about his or her self, thus affecting one’s degree of depression. In this research, the author tries to quantify how acculturation affects degree of depression. 2. Materials and Methods
This paper analyzes data from the 2010-2011 Chinese American Cardiovascular Health Assessment (CHA CHA.) The CHA CHA study was a cross-sectional survey using a community based convenience sample of 2072 immigrant Chinese Americans living in New York. (Afable et al., 2016, Rajpathak and Wylie-Rosett, 2011, Yi et al., 2016) Among other information collected were demographics, PHQ-8 and acculturation.
The author’s t arget population is first generation Chinese Americans whose primary language spoken at home is Chinese. Therefore, people indicating they were not born in China, and people whose primary language spoken at home is not Chinese were eliminated

SMAS is a 32-item scale with statements on language, social perspective, food, etc. asking the participants to rate using the following scale: false, partly false, partly true, and true, corresponding to point values from 1 to 4. There are two dimensions in the 32-item scale. The first 17 questions are categorized as the first dimension—Ethnic Society Immersion (ESI), which asses how closely one identifies with their native country, in this case China. The later 17 questions are defined as the second dimension – Dominant Society Immersion (DSI), which asses how closely one identifies with the host country, in this case the United States. To estimate ESI, the points for the 1-17 questions are averaged. To estimate DSI, the points for the 18-32 questions are. The scores for ESI and DSI range from 0 to