Treatment of Depression

According to The World Health Organization, depression is one of the top five global health problems. Luckily, there was a research done called Treatment As Usual (TAU) for treating depression in which a correlation of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and combined treatment was done at an extensive medical center. There were hundreds of randomized controlled trials (RCT) done which clearly showed the productiveness of combined pharmacotherapy (medical treatment by drugs) and psychotherapy (talk therapy) to treat depression related disorders. This research affected clinical practice of treating depression by being included into official practice procedure. The great amount of RCT studies of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy has come about in many meta-analyses evaluating the approximate efficacy of these treatments. Even though the accurate consensus had not been brought to successful conclusion, the most of meta-analytic studies have presume that psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are equally effective for treating depression.
Despite the fact there is substantial experimental support of the effectiveness of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy as treatments of depression, there has been significantly limited research done about the strength of these treatments when they are brought to patients in clinical practices. It is assumed that the outcomes for experimentally supported treatments of depression given in TAU conditions would be different from RCT. There was a study done on 4080 patients from August 1, 2007 through January 31, 2012, therapists were enforced to assign up to three DSM-IV diagnostic codes for a patient at each evaluation. For this research depression was labeled as any DSM-IV diagnostic code for major depressive disorder (MDD). Analyses were recorded at the primary evaluation and after each thirteen week period follow up checkup. During this study 42% of the 4,080 patients were diagnosed with depression.
Treatment as usual study also helped