Depression is on course to be the leading cause of disability worldwide by the year 2030, yet it remains grossly undiagnosed and undertreated. Four groups suffer disproportionately from this problem: racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, those with limited English, and men, who because of the disparities they face, may also experience poorer mental health outcomes.
The first step to leading a healthy life is enrolling in an appropriate depression screening program at a treatment facility, and these balanced rehabs make sure that you rehabilitate both your body and mind. If you or a loved one is struggling with depression, you might want to look into a 30 day rehab in Seattle that provides such all-encompassing recovery programs. Treatment for poor mental health and depression is a keyhole of recovery for both young and elderly people.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco have tried to address and correct these disparities. In a fall 2019 study, they asked whether a routine screening for depression administered in a primary care setting might be effective at closing the mental health treatment gap for traditionally under-served patients. Here is what they found….
What Happened After Implementing a Depression Screening in Primary Care?
It was a relatively simple solution, really: to implement a routine depression screening in the primary care setting with the goal of improving detection of depression in patients who were more at risk of falling through the cracks. Roughly 53,000 primary care patients in a California health system were followed during and after the rollout of the screening. The result was a dramatic increase in depression screening rates, from 40.5 percent in 2017 to 88.8 percent in 2019.
Strikingly, that substantive increase in screening rates eliminated the “statistically significant disparities” that older patients, racial and ethnic minorities, and patients with language barriers face. Only disparities facing men did not disappear—a question worth exploring in future research as to why.
Overall, then, the results were promising. They led to the conclusion that depression screening disparities “narrowed over time for most groups, suggesting that routine screening in primary care may reduce screening disparities and improve recognition and appropriate treatment for all patients.”
What Might Explain These Encouraging Results?
Several factors may help to explain these results. First, they help to reinforce the important role that primary care doctors, as a first critical point of contact for people with depressive symptoms, can play in triaging depression and other mental health challenges. As it is, many patients do receive treatment for depression, as well as psychiatric referrals, from their primary physician. (Learn more about the benefits of seeking intensive mental health care from a psychiatrist.) When primary care doctors are so often a first go-to for depressive symptoms, that suggests that routine depression screenings in primary care settings can be very effective at recognizing symptoms and helping to intervene earlier.
Another explanation for these results, though, is that depression far too often goes undetected in primary care settings. For example, the same UC-SF study noted that depressive symptoms are not recognized in more than 50 percent of people who visit their primary physician, rendering treatment inconceivable.
Until recently, too, various factors were barriers to depression screenings. These results could therefore be (at least in part) a function of how a broadly applied screening can make a significant difference in a system where screening and detection of depression have been rare.
How Addressing Disparities Is Good for Everyone, Not Just the Under-Served
Maybe the most encouraging takeaway from this study is that a routine depression screening was able to increase screening rates for under-served populations—and to do so while at the same time improving screening rates for the population at large. That goes to go show that a simple tool like a routine screening for depression, when implemented to reach minorities, those with limited English, and older people, is good for everyone. At a time when rates of depression and other mental illnesses are up, that is encouraging news.