Identifying depression through the internet

The internet offers a valuable opportunity for the public to screen themselves for depression, according to a new study.

Published today in BMC Psychiatry, the report demonstrated that a Chinese online tool for assessing depression is both accurate and reproducible, and may offer a way to identify the growing number of people suffering from depression.
 
Chao-Cheng Lin of the National Taiwan University Hospital, Yu-Chuan Li of the National Yang-Ming University, and other colleagues in Taiwan developed the Internet-based Self-assessment Program for Depression (ISP-D).
 
Between September 2001 and January 2002 the team recruited 579 subjects via a popular mental health website.
 
Volunteers were sent a follow-up email one to two weeks after completing the first questionnaire inviting them to re-sit the test, and those who completed the questionnaires were offered a psychiatrist’s appointment to validate the diagnosis.
 
Results of the first assessment showed that 31 per cent of participants had major depressive disorder, seven per cent a minor depressive disorder, 15 per cent had some symptoms of depression that did not amount to a full diagnosis of depression (subsyndromal depressive symptoms) and 46 per cent had no depression.
 
Analysis of the retest results shows excellent reproducibility for major depressive disorder.

Depression diagnosis

The reproducibility was lower for minor depressive disorder, which may be because minor depression is not a stable diagnosis.
 
The psychiatrist’s follow-up revealed that the diagnosis was correct for three-quarters of those tested online.
 
Already between 1/5 and 2/5 of the world’s population suffer from depression, but most remain undetected or go untreated, making it vital to provide more opportunities for diagnosis.
 
"The ISP-D provides a continuously available, inexpensive, and easily maintained depression screening method that is accessible to a large number of individuals across a broad geographic area," wrote the authors.
 
This tool allows people to reliably assess depression in them on their own and in a short amount of time.
 

You’ve read it. Now review it.

Back to top

Back to top