Understanding sadness: Developing a screening inventory for depression in Indonesia

This research was designed to develop a culturally salient depression assessment for Javanese people. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with Javanese people diagnosed with depression in primary health care (PHC) settings in the Special Region of Yogyakarta to understand their experience of depression. Clinical psychologists were also interviewed to explore how depression was managed in PHC settings. Javanese express their depression through universal and unique symptoms. Therefore the Indonesian Depression Checklist (The IDC) was developed, which consisted of 19 items, with five factors including religiosity. Confirmatory factor analysis showed good reliability with construct and convergent validity to measure depression among Javanese.