I believe while doing research about depression we are doing a huge mistake. We often use screening tools for depression, such a self-reported scale (e.g. EURO-D), and those who are at risk are often called "depressed".
Being at high risk for depression does not mean being depressed.
I often read about incredibly high prevalence of depression in many studies, but then in the methods I see a screening tool was used to measure depressive symptoms.
Depression is not diagnosed in such a way.
Diagnosis of depression can be done only in a clinical setting.
While using scale for screening, we need to talk about "individuals at high risk for depression" or individuals with "high level of depressive symptoms".
It is like if we would refer to those with low tolerance to glucose as diabetic after asking them the value of glucose last time they made a blood test. Actually, this would be even more accurate.
What is your idea?
In original article ( Prince, M. J., at al. 1999) it is highlighted that EURO-D can be use for measuring depression severity in comparative epidemiological studies. That means only for epidemiological studies.
we can call it a psychological distress which happens due to prolonged exposure to socio-economic adversities. My paper has discussed a lot about this Article Need for care to caregivers: Psychological distress and its ...
and Kessler Psychological Distress (K10) by kessler et al (2010) is one of the best tool for assessing it.
Well, even if depression is clinical diagnosis, where you have to have 5 symptoms out of 9 during at least two weeks - what should we call a condition where person is having 4 of 9 symptoms and they are fluctuating during the 2 months for example ?
Biologically the mechanism is mostly the same. These people can benefit from treatment as well as those with that "official" diagnosis.
So what should we do in similar situations ?
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