[The relationship between work factors and psychiatric symptoms--a comparison between anxiety and depression]

The depression scale (Zung Self-rating Depression Scale) and the anxiety scale (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) have often been used to study the mental health of workers. We carried out a comparative study to determine which these two scales more clearly reflects the work stress. We used two methodologically different materials: a questionnaire survey and mental health consultation records. The questionnaire was sent to 885 male workers in a large industrial company and its related companies, and the consultation cases were 84 male workers coming from the area where the questionnaire survey was conducted. The work problem questionnaire was factored and the four work factors that were obtained were used in the succeeding analyses. The results of the questionnaire survey showed that depression had a higher multiple correlation with the four work factors than did the state anxiety. Similarly, the consultation cases, in which the main symptom was depression, accounted for a little more than 40% of all cases, but the anxiety cases accounted for only 10%-20%. Both studies indicated that depression is a more important manifestation of work stress than anxiety. The questionnaire survey also showed that the "quality-of-work" factor and the "work-quantity/environment" factor had relatively high standardized partial regression coefficients, when depression was predicted by the four work factors. In the case of the consultation cases, more than 50% of the depressive cases were caused by overload. Since the "work-quantity/environment" factor was considered to be closely related to overload, the salient relation between depression and overload agrees with the results of the consultation research.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)