Lifestyle of Youth in Pakistan: Impact of Lifestyle Factors on the Depressive Behavior of Youth

Abstract

The dominance of depression is common in youth of Pakistan, and it is essential to alleviate it as they are nation builders. There are probablysome lifestyle factors are intensifying depression. This research is intended to assess which lifestyle factors are leading to depression and are to be controlled to assassinate it so that adolescents can enjoy a happy and healthy life both mentally and physically. This study is based on an online random sample of 340 subjects, the majority female within the age group 18-25.  Data collection was done using structured questionnaire to evaluate lifestyle of youth and modified version of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) is used to analyze severity of depression. KNN, SVM, Decision tree and Logistic regression are  used  for machine leaning analysis and Pearson’s chi-squared statistical hypothesis,  Cramer’s  V  Statistic,  Spearman rank correlation statistic and proportion testing with z-statistics are used for statistical analysis. It has been found that water intake (p=0.03<0.05), sleep duration (p=0.02<0.05), occupational satisfaction level (p=0.03<0.05), and social media usage (p=0.02<0.05) are the lifestyle factors that are dependent on depression. Controlling these factors i.e. drinking 6-8 glasses of water/day, sleeping 6-8 hours/day, high occupation satisfaction and less social media usage assists in reducing depression.