Comparison of depressive symptoms in first presentation of schizophrenia with normal healthy subjects: A hospital based study

Aims: to determine the severity of depressive symptoms in patients with first presentation schizophrenia in comparison with the normal subjects. another important objective was to see the relationship between severity of depressive symptoms with positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia,gender and age. design: co-relational study with cross sectional research design. duration and place of study: it took one year to complete the data collection,analyze the results and report writing. the data was collected from both indoor and outdoor psychiatric department of lahore general hospital lahore pakistan. method: a non-probability purposive sample of 100 patients with schizophrenia and 100 controls,age ranging from 15-65 years. measures for data collection were demographic questionnaire,panss and hamilton depression rating scale. results: the results of present study show that depressive symptoms are common in patients with schizophrenia than in general population. moreover the depressive symptoms are significantly associated with positive symptoms derived from panss. the study does not show any statistically significant relationship with age and gender. conclusion: schizophrenic illness has many domains and associated problems and depression is one important associated problem that most of the patients suffering.