Recognition of depression and anxiety in primary care

BMJ 1999;318:1558 ( 5 June )

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Recognition of depression and anxiety in primary care

Patients' attributional style is important factor

General health questionnaire alone is not sufficient for making psychiatric diagnosis

Patients' attributional style is important factor

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Kessler et al found that doctors detected psychiatric illness in less than half of patients scoring highly on the generalhealth questionnaire (85% of patients with a normalising attributionalstyle and 38% with a psychologising style were not detected).¹These data are in accordance with the work that we did in fourSpanish primary care centres. Using the general health questionnaire-28in the first part of the study and a SCAN interview ² ³ inthe second, we found similar figures of non-recognition of psychiatricillness⁴ and the same relevance of somatisation to lower ratesof recognition of mental illness by general practitioners.⁵

In her commentary on the paper Heath doubts that scoring highly on the general health questionnaire could be equated withhaving a treatable disorder. We agree with her that the generalhealth questionnaire is a screening questionnaire, not a diagnostictool, and that doctors should not talk . . . [Full text of this article]

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