To help clear things up, on Tuesday, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released new recommendations, urging all pregnant women to be preemptively screened for depression.
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In this case, many other groups already recommend screening patients for depression, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, which recommends screening adults, including pregnant women and new mothers.
And about 9 percent of pregnant women and 10 percent of women who have just given birth suffer from depression, the group said. Maternal mental illness has been found to be more common than was previously believed, the New York Times reports, and new research has also found that postpartum depression often starts during pregnancy. Risk factors during pregnancy and after delivery include poor self-esteem, child-care stress, prenatal anxiety and decreased social support, the report said.
The updates to the pool to groups that have not been recommended to be screened by the group when the group made recommendations in 2009.
The Task Force recommends that doctors work with adults patients with depression to determine the best treatment plan, which could include antidepressants, psychotherapy or both. Fortunately, there are innovative treatment options including video-conferencing therapy and online therapy. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent, volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine. It issues recommendations, and revisits them on a regular basis to make sure that medical evidence still supports the guidelines. About 8 percent of kids age 12 and older and adults have depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, should be screened at least once a year, wrote Thase, a professor of psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her experience with postpartum depression inspired Koss to get a degree in counseling.
The fatal flaw of mass screening for depression is that the methods used, commonly a simple questionnaire, can’t distinguish between sadness – a completely normal emotion requiring no treatment – and clinical depression, which nearly always does need to be treated, sometimes urgently. Whooley, MD, FACP, FAHA, FACC, San Francisco VA Health Care System, wrote that her previous research demonstrated that two yes-or-no questions from the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD) was effective in screening for depression.
The experts on the task force reviewed the latest evidence on depression screening, its accuracy and the potential benefits and harms of treatments. “People are going to be depressed whether we screen them or not”, Poleshuck said. “For the meantime, clinicians should use their judgment about the risk of depression in their patients, in deciding how often to screen”.
The task force is in the midst of updating its recommendations for depression screening in children and teens.
Caught early, depression is highly treatable; most patients can continue with their lives, hold jobs, and maintain relationships.
In terms of treatment, the panel said evidence showed cognitive behavioral therapy had proved beneficial for mothers and mother-to-be suffering with depression. While some critics may argue the questioning could consume too much of doctors’ time-or that such a screening would pose a privacy issue-it’s important to understand that a mother’s mental state can have a huge effect on her own health, as well as her child’s immediate and future health.
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Dr. Rebecca Stark of the Cleveland Clinic says depression screening is routine there.
