Primary care doctors should not screen their patients for depression

Effect of Depression Screening After Acute Coronary Syndromes on Quality of Life

“…The electronic prompt did not result in lower depressive symptoms. From 2006 to 2013, the United Kingdom Quality and Outcomes Framework financially incentivized systematic depression screening of primary care patients with coronary heart disease or diabetes . It was estimated that 976 patients had to be screened for each new diagnosis of depression and 687 patients screened for each new antidepressant prescription.…”

Are ADHD Screeners Safe to Use?

“…Screening tests for medical and psychological conditions are no longer assumed to be benign. Indeed, researchers have increasingly argued that screening certain populations for conditions as diverse as prostate cancer (Moyer, 2012) and depression (Thombs & Ziegelstein, 2017) may entail more harm than benefit. Although replication and extension to other samples and screening contexts will be necessary to establish the generalizability of our results, the present study provides preliminary evidence that screening for ADHD in healthy college students does not significantly distort subsequent reporting on a full ADHD symptom inventory or contaminate performance on tasks demanding attentional resources.…”

Drivers of and Solutions for the Overuse of Antidepressant Medication in Pediatric Populations

“…Thus, some readers might ask, "How could screening for depression be harmful?" However, screening for depression is only useful when it improves outcomes beyond those of standard care (14)(15)(16). For example, a 2017 systematic review of the clinical trial evidence for depression screening among children and adolescents (17) found no direct randomized control trials (RCTs) evidence to support it.…”

“…Transient and contextual reasons can be the basis for an adolescent scoring "positive" on a depression screening instrument and substantial improvement in mood can result when these stressors abate (24). Second, there is the possibility of the nocebo effect, the negative or iatrogenic effect of placing labels on peoples' distress, when they themselves have not categorized their experience nor sought a mental health diagnosis from a health care or school setting [see, e.g., (15,25)]. Also, for screening to improve health outcomes there must be high quality evidence (preferably from randomized clinical trials) demonstrating its effectiveness and safety.…”