Assessment of Depression, Anxiety, Stress and Influence of Selected Demographic Variables among Police Constables

In modern society, crime multiplies and has become multi-dimensional with the latest disturbing behaviors such as cyber crime, white collar crime, money laundering, drug trafficking, pornography, digital counterfeiting, human trafficking, domestic violence, terrorism, frauds, sexual crimes. and so on. Some people have misused all modern technological innovations for criminal enterprise. The Indian criminal justice system has an important responsibility in managing crimes and crime-related matters in which police personnel play an important role. The present survey was aimed at assessing the levels of depression, anxiety and stress among police constables in and around Mysore. A total of 180 police constabes were selected randomly and they were administered anxiety, Depression and Stress Scale (ADSS) developed by Pallavi Bhatnagar et al., 1995). Independent samples t tests were employed to find out the significance of mean difference between gender, type of family and marital stress. The findings of the study revealed that On the whole, 22.2% of the police constables had high levels of anxiety, 22.8% of them experienced high levels of depression and only 6.1% of them experienced high levels of stress. Gender of the police constables did not have significant influence over anxiety, depression and stress. Type of family of the police constables did not have significant influence over anxiety, depression and stress. Married police constables had higher anxiety compared to unmarried/single police constables, however marital status did not influence depression and stress.