image

Health

Panel now recommends depression screening for all adults

All adults, including pregnant women and new mothers, should be screened for depression as a routine part of health care, a government advisory group recommended Tuesday. Depression is a common public health problem, and screening simply involves health workers asking about certain symptoms even if patients don’t mention them. Major depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability among adults in high-income countries, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

If you just wait for patients to say they’re depressed, you miss a significant number of people who are depressed and would benefit from treatment.

Dr. Michael Pignone, a USPSTF member and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The recommendation published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association is an update to the panel’s 2009 recommendation that supported depression screening for adults if their doctors’ offices were capable of providing quality care. The panel now says everyone age 18 or older should be screened for depression, with adequate systems in place to ensure accurate diagnosis, effective treatment and appropriate follow-up.

The reality of American health care is that mental health has to be done in primary care. …There is no reason why you can’t do the screening right there [in the waiting room] on an iPad.

Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Health Care in California