CityView Magazine

health Detecting depression Research sheds new light on treatment options By Dr. Lenny Salzberg Resources: For more information about depression, visit the National Institute for Mental Health at: www.nimh.nih.gov You may also contact your local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They help with screening, triage and referral services for six major mental illnesses, including Major Depression. NAMI provides support, advocacy, information and education. For more information, contact Robert Mock at 488.5284. The good news: depression is now recognized as an illness, not the stigma that it once was, and new research is shedding new light on ways to treat it. Family physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists have all been trained to diagnose D and treat depression. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends screening adults for depression in primary care offices by asking some variation of these two questions: over the past two weeks, have you felt down, depressed or hopeless? Have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things? If you answer yes to either question, your doctor should follow up with the SIGECAPSS questions on Page 64. But even then, depression is often missed, up to 60 percent of the time on a first visit. Patients (and doctors) tend to focus on the symptoms of fatigue, disturbed sleep and aches and pains, not feelings. The good news is that doctors do diagnose depression at follow-up visits in at least half of the patients we initially missed. Treatment options include medication, counseling or both, but until recently we CityViewNC.com | 65 epression is more than the “blues” or feeling down: it is a serious and surprisingly common illness that will affect between five and 18 percent of us at some point in our lives. And for those of us who suffer one major depressive episode, 50 to 60 percent of us will have a second and 70 percent of those people will have a third. How depressing!

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