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Suicide.pkHonest, stigma-free guides — what these conditions really are, how to cope, how to help someone you love, and how to find real support in Pakistan. None of this is medical advice; it's a place to start.
How the 0-27 total is built, what the five severity bands mean, why the same person can score differently in two weeks, and the single most important thing the number cannot do.
People answer item 8 wrong more than any other. A plain walk through all nine items, the two-week window, and how to score honestly when life has an obvious reason to be hard.
Why 10 is the number clinicians watch, what changes between one band and the next, and why a band describes symptoms rather than a person.
Anaemia, thyroid, vitamin D and B12, diabetes, sleep debt, grief, burnout, medication side effects and plain exhaustion all push a PHQ-9 score up. What to rule out before you accept the label.
The ninth item is the one item that matters regardless of your total. What it is asking, why it is scored separately in practice, and what to do in the next hour.
A short field guide to the instruments you will meet: which screens for what, which one a Pakistani clinician is most likely to hand you, and why more than one is often used together.
What a screening questionnaire is genuinely good at, where it fails, what a false positive costs, whether it works outside the countries it was written in, and whether you can fool it.
Who to see first, what it is likely to cost, exactly what to say in the first two minutes of the appointment, what to bring, and what the doctor will probably do next.
A different first week for each band, what to do while waiting for an appointment, what to do when a psychiatrist is unaffordable, and how to tell whether anything is working.
How much a score naturally wobbles, what size of change is real, how long treatment takes to show up in the total, and how to present a trend to a clinician.