Effect of detection of depression in general practice

BMJ 1996;312:512 (24 February)

Letters

Effect of detection of depression in general practice

Authors do not give enough information

EDITOR,--Christopher Dowrick and Iain Buchan¹ have shown whatHoeper et al showed some years ago²: that telling a generalpractitioner that a patient has a high score on a screeningquestionnaire does the patient no good. It is difficult to seewhy it should. I find it strange that the authors do not thinkit necessary to show what the doctors did for the patients inthe three groups (those with conspicuous depression, detecteddepression, and undetected depression), although in any otherbranch of medicine the course of a patient's illness might beexpected to bear some relation to interventions. It is hardlysurprising that patients whom the doctors intended to treatdid less well than those whom the doctors did not intend totreat, since they might be expected to have more severe depressiveillnesses.

We are not told how good these . . . [Full text of this article]

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