Rising prevalence of depression and widening sociodemographic disparities in depressive symptoms among Filipino youth: findings from two large nationwide cross-sectional surveys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Youth depression is a critical target for early intervention due to its strong links with adult depression and long-term functional impairment. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) like the Philippines, limited epidemiological data hampers mental health service planning for youth. This study analyzed nationally representative survey data from 2013 (n = 10,949) and 2021 (n = 19,178) to estimate the prevalence of moderate to severe depressive symptoms (MSDS) among Filipinos aged 15-24 years, using the 11-item version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Survey-weighted analyses revealed that MSDS prevalence more than doubled from 9.6% in 2013 to 20.9% in 2021. The rise was most pronounced among females (10.8% to 24.3%), non-cisgender or homonormative individuals (9.7% to 32.3%), youth with primary education or less (10.8% to 26.5%), youth from economically disadvantaged households (10.6% to 25.1%) and youth who were separated, widowed or divorced (18.3% to 41.3%). Disparities in MSDS also widened over time, with some groups bearing a disproportionate burden. These findings underscore the need to expand accessible, high-quality mental health services for youth in LMICs, such as the Philippines. Continued monitoring and targeted interventions are essential to address the rising burden of depression, particularly among underserved and disproportionately affected groups.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".