Americans diagnosed with depression have a highly conflicted relationship with the notion of ongoing depression care. As a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry this week carefully documents, more Americans are being diagnosed with depression (in 2007, 2.88% of the U.S. population got a diagnosis of depression — up from 2.37% a decade before). But fewer and fewer of those patients get any kind of psychotherapy (43.1%, down from 53.6% in 1998), despite the fact that most say that would be their preferred form of treatment. Meanwhile, the majority of depressed patients are put on antidepressant medication (75.3% in 2007, just a hair up from 73.8% a decade earlier). But more than half typically abandon those prescription drugs as soon as their worst symptoms disappear, if not sooner.
Unfortunately, good luck to you for trying to find a psychiatrist nowadays who practices psychotherapy instead of just psychopharmacology.
Chronic care means more than just getting a patient to take their pills. It comes down to behavior change. If you don’t change the behavior, patient’s will relapse. We need to focus more on health behaviors to effect long term term healing and just taking a pill is not the answer.
