Distress, depression and anxiety among persons seeking HIV testing

ABSTRACT

We investigated psychological distress and symptoms of depression and anxiety among 485 South Africans seeking HIV testing. The mean scores of the sample were 45.78 (SD = 16.81) on the Hopkins Symptom Checklist; 15.8 (SD = 12.4) on the Beck Depression Inventory and 12.44 (SD = 13.00) on the Beck Anxiety Inventory, which fell in the elevated, mild and low ranges on these instruments, respectively. For more than a third of participants, symptoms of depression and clinically significant distress were at least moderate and in some cases severe, indicating that they may have benefitted from psychological help. We make the case that symptoms of depression and distress are common among persons seeking HIV testing and are therefore not a consequence of an HIV-positive test result.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• distress
• anxiety
• test-seeking

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Laing De Villers, Simona Flavio, Carla Nortje, Daniel Goldstone, Camilla Rankin, Xanthe Hunt and Mpho Sefatsa for assisting with data collection for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation.