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The need to consider quality of life as an outcome of antidepressant therapy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Jenny Morris
Jenny Morris*
Affiliation:
Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York YO1 5DD
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Depression is a very common disorder. It has been estimated that 20% of all women and 13% of all men will develop depression at some time during their lifetime, although much of the depression which exists in the community is unrecognised and untreated. Approximately 75% of the female population and over 50% of the male population attend their general practitioners at least once with a psychiatric complaint, of whom 70% of the women and 34% of the men have a depressive episode. While treatment for some patients will be successful following the acute phase of the depressive episode, it will generally take at least three months and in some instances six months or more to treat an episode. The risk of relapse following treatment is high, affecting approximately 50% of patients treated; furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that those patients being treated for their first episode of depression are less vulnerable to relapse following response to treatment than those who have suffered previous episodes of depression.

Type
Original articles
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 15 , Issue 12 , December 1991 , pp. 723 - 724
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991

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