Suicide.pkUnderstanding your result
Honest, 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.
Reading your PHQ-9 score — what the number is actually telling you
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.
The nine questions, one by one — what each PHQ-9 item is really asking
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.
Minimal, mild, moderate, severe — where the cut-offs come from
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.
Is it depression, or is it your thyroid? Nine things that look the same
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.
Question 9 — what to do if you did not answer "not at all"
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.
PHQ-2, GAD-7, HADS, BDI, EPDS — the other questionnaires and when each is used
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.
Can a free online depression test actually be trusted?
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.
Taking your score to a doctor in Pakistan — GP or psychiatrist, and what to say
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.
You have your result. What actually happens now?
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.
Re-testing — how often, and what a moving number does and does not prove
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.