The Newsroom  •  Published Tuesday, Jul. 17, 2007, 10:18 AM
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Is depression over-diagnosed? Some of it is just feeling sad

Galveston County Daily News, July 17, 2007 Column by Howard Brody GALVESTON - We family docs don't get to say "I told you so" very often, so we have to take our chances when they come. For many years there has been a sort of cottage industry among academic psychiatrists called "do research studies that show how poor a job primary care docs do of diagnosing depression in the community." The bottom line in all these studies seems to be that family docs and other primary care physicians miss many cases of depression, which any good psychiatrist could spot. We have grumbled about the research methods, and argued that almost all the "missed" cases were the mild variety of depression that in most instances would get better by itself without treatment. But it rankled to be told that we could not diagnose depression well, when one of things that we think makes family medicine stand out among specialties, is our long-term relationship with the patient. If we think we get to know our patients better than other docs, who may see them only for one type of illness, we should be much better able to figure out if they are depressed or not. So I was gratified to see a research study by Jerome Wakefield and colleagues in the Archives of General Psychiatry, which suggests that the standard criteria that psychiatrists rely on to diagnose depression may be flawed.



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