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Rebecca Voelker

JAMA. 2001;285:1431-1433.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

When Drew Pinsky, MD, started treating psychiatric conditions as an internist in the late 1980s, patients with unipolar depression often considered the diagnosis a personal insult. "They became irate and stormed out of my office," recalled Pinsky, medical director for the Department of Chemical Dependency at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, Calif.

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Today, Pinsky noted, patients are more willing to accept that they have depression. "There is a higher level of awareness and less stigma," he said. Thanks to education campaigns and new antidepressant medications with fewer adverse effects and a reduced risk of fatal overdose, primary care physicians are treating a substantial number of patients with depression.

Last year primary care physicians wrote nearly twice the number of prescriptions for antidepressant medications as psychiatrists, according to health care information specialists at IMS Health in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. But how effective is treatment for . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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