This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Primary Care/ Family Medicine  • Psychiatry  • Depression  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

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

To the Editor: In their nationally representative US survey, Dr Kessler and colleagues reported that of individuals who reported depression, 64.3% seen in the specialty mental health sector had received adequate care, but that only 41.9% of individuals seen in primary care had received care at this level.¹ Although these percentages may seem to imply that the mental health sector provides better care for patients with depression,² there are significant differences between patients with depression who seek care from their primary physicians vs those who are treated by mental health specialists. Patients with depression seen in the specialty mental health sector receive more care and would not be there if they did not accept that they needed such care. They also are probably more likely to adhere to treatment. The situation in primary care is different, where patients with depression typically present with somatic symptoms such as fatigue, may not . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Allen J. Dietrich, MD
Department of Community and Family Medicine

Thomas E. Oxman, MD
Department of Psychiatry
Dartmouth Medical School
Hanover, NH

John W. Williams, Jr, MD, MHS
Department of Medicine
Duke University Medical School
Durham, NC

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Treatment of Depression by Mental Health Specialists and Primary Care Physicians
Mark H. Ebell
JAMA. 2003;290(15):1991-1992.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Treatment of Depression by Mental Health Specialists and Primary Care Physicians
Harold Alan Pincus
JAMA. 2003;290(15):1992.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Treatment of Depression by Mental Health Specialists and Primary Care Physicians—Reply
Ronald C. Kessler, Olga Demler, Robert Jin, Ellen E. Walters, Patricia Berglund, Doreen Koretz, Kathleen R. Merikangas, A. John Rush, and Philip S. Wang
JAMA. 2003;290(15):1992-1993.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

The Epidemiology of Major Depressive Disorder: Results From the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R)
Ronald C. Kessler, Patricia Berglund, Olga Demler, Robert Jin, Doreen Koretz, Kathleen R. Merikangas, A. John Rush, Ellen E. Walters, and Philip S. Wang
JAMA. 2003;289(23):3095-3105.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Educational and Organizational Interventions to Improve the Management of Depression in Primary Care: A Systematic Review
Simon Gilbody, Paula Whitty, Jeremy Grimshaw, and Ruth Thomas
JAMA. 2003;289(23):3145-3151.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT