Table 2 provides the age-gender distribution of CES-D scores.
Depressive symptoms are higher for women and increase markedly
with age. These are standard results, but we show that they hold
nationally for China. Depressive symptoms are also a good deal
higher in rural than in urban areas. Using 10 and above as a cutoff
point for high depressive symptoms (see Andreasen et al., 1994, for
justification of this cutoff), we find that a large fraction of Chinese
elderly aged 45 and over have CES-D scores 10 and over, 30% of men
and 43% for women. As one can see, for seniors aged 60 and over
these fractions are higher, just under 35% for men and nearly half
for women.