Somatic symptoms in Turkish and German depressed patients

We determined the pattern and severity of symptoms in Turkish and German depressed inpatients. Psychopathological and somatic symptoms were documented on standardized rating scales of the Association for Methodology and Documentation in Psychiatry (AMDP) System. Of a total sample of 6000 inpatients admitted to the Psychiatric Department of the Free University of Berlin from 1981 to 1989, 28 Turkish inpatients with diagnoses of depression, according to the International Classification of Diseases, ninth revision, were compared with a randomly selected group of matched German depressed inpatients. Turkish patients scored higher only on the Vegetative-somatic syndrome scale but did not differ on the Depressive or Apathetic syndrome scale of the AMDP System.