Depression Severity Similar Among Primary Care and Psychiatric Clinics

Major depression severity is much the same in a psychiatric clinic as it is in the practice of a generalist, reported investigators.
"Conventional wisdom has held that depressed patients in primary care settings are less severely depressed, experience a milder course of illness, have a distinct symptom profile with more complaints of fatigue and somatic symptoms, and are more likely to have accompanying physical complaints than depressed patients seeking psychiatric specialty care," wrote Bradley N. Gaynes, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of North Carolina here, and colleagues in the STAR*D study.
But the study of more than 2,500 patients with major depressive disorder in both primary care and specialty practices found that while there slight differences in some measures, levels of moderately severe depression were similar, the STAR*D team reported in the March/April issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.