In the world of primary care, we have been struggling for years to render adequate care to our depressed patients. We often fail, even though we know that depression is common, painful, disabling, and expensive.1 We also know that there are adequate treatments available. Or are there? For over 2 decades investigators have been testing whether that’s true, and by now the number of studies runs into the thousands. So this is a good time to pause and take stock. What do we know about the 2 fundamental modalities—pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy—for treating depression in primary care? In this issue of the Annals, Linde et al present a pair of excellent meta-analyses that summarize and extend our current state of knowledge about the efficacy or effectiveness of these 2 categories of treatment for depression in the primary care setting.2,3 These results, and the studies on which they are based, can help us understand something about how to care for these patients, the persistent shortfalls in our care, and what we might do next about those shortfalls.
The studies that form the substrate for these 2 meta-analyses are them
[For more of this story, written by Frank V. deGuy, go to http://annfammed.org/content/13/1/3.full
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