Depression - National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health

Depression affects 6% of adults each year and is the leading cause of suicide. Its symptoms can be disabling and its effects pervasive, impacting on not only the individual patient but also on their families and the wider society. This book is an invaluable resource enabling healthcare professionals to recognise, assess and offer effective treatments for this common mental health problem, which can become a chronic disorder if inadequately treated.

This updated guideline includes new sections on: current practice; service user and carer experiences; emphasis on low-intensity psychosocial interventions and an increased range of effective psychological interventions; and the management of subthreshold depressive symptoms.

This guideline is an update of the previous guidance from NICE (full guideline published 2004) on depression.

NICE Mental Health Guidelines

These guidelines from NICE set out clear recommendations, based on the best available evidence, for health care professionals on how to work with and implement physical, psychological and service-level interventions for people with various mental health conditions.

The book contains the full guidelines that cannot be obtained in print anywhere else. It brings together all of the evidence that led to the recommendations made, detailed explanations of the methodology behind their preparation, plus an overview of the condition covering detection, diagnosis and assessment, and the full range of treatment and care approaches.

The accompanying free CD-ROM contains all the data used as evidence, including:

• Included and excluded studies.
• Profile tables that summarise both the quality of the evidence and the results of the evidence synthesis.
• All meta-analytical data, presented as forest plots.
• Detailed information about how to use and interpret forest plots.