Bipolar Variations in Primary Care Depression: how common? How diagnosed?
What is it about?
Depression is common in primary care, but detecting bipolar depression is difficult. We show that screening all patients with depression for the entire mood spectrum (from plain depression to clearly bipolar) is feasible. It's also appropriate, given the spectrum of results on screening tests. And it does not lead to "overdiagnosis", as judged by patient outcomes.
Why is it important?
Primary care provides more mental health services than psychiatry and psychotherapists *combined*. So if you want to help address depression in your entire service population, you have to work with your primary care colleagues. We've shown that this is do-able (and fun, by the way), targeting one of the depression variations they have the most trouble with (next on the list will be PTSD...).