Majority of healthcare professionals are struggling with conducting and writing a protocol for a research study. Thus, the purpose of this article is to summarize significant steps and necessary guidelines for producing a standard research protocol, roles and responsibilities of various team members involved in the study, and conduction of actual clinical trial including its initiation, phases (I-III), termination or post-marketing surveillance phase. It is important to note that the quality of a clinical trial largely depends on the protocol to achieve success in the research study.

The real challenge regards depression is the barriers associated with its diagnosis and treatment. These barriers are present due to the stigma associated with depression, as many individuals do not consider depression disease and believe it should not require any medical treatment. To overcome this stigma, there are several depression awareness programs started worldwide to make our population aware of depression. Thus, this was the aim of our study; it was conducted via a questionnaire survey with 300 random subjects. The results showed a significant variation among healthcare professionals vs. non-healthcare professionals. There was no significant difference among gender or age variations.