Introduction: Diabetes mellitus is a common chronic metabolic disease. Optimal management of psychiatric problems, especially depression, may lead to better control of blood glucose levels in diabetics. Unfortunately, depression is usually neglected in medical diseases. We evaluated the prevalence of depression using a simple test, (Beck test), to screen. depression in diabetics.

Methodology: This Cross sectional study was performed on 100 patient's refered to diabetes clinic in zabol during a 4-month period. Beck inventory questionnaire for depression was used for data collection. Beck inventory is a depression screening test having 21 indicators 13for cognitive and 8 for physical symptoms. To analyze the data, the Beck test scores for each case were added. Scores of 0–9 were considered as "without depression", 10-16 "slight depression", 17–29 "moderate depression" and scores of 30-63 as "severe depression". Chi–square test and spearman correlation coefficient were used for data analysis

Results: Results showed that the majority of patients (52%) were female. The majority of patients (52%) suffered type 2 diabetes. Results suggested that the patients that most of men (23%) has mild depression and 12% in average and the majority of women (18%) have  moderate depression and 10% had severe depression. The majority of patients (38%) had mild depression and moderate depression (30%) and 13% had severe depression.

Conclusion: Our findings revealed high prevalence of depression symptoms among diabetic patients (type I and II). Considering the conventional simple therapies for depression, proper screening among diabetics seems to be necessary.