Most Depressed Adults Going Without Treatment

Jan. 5 -- MONDAY, Jan. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Most depressed adults in the United States don't get the minimum recommended treatment, and the vacuum is especially dramatic among minority populations.

"This was very astonishing," said Hector Gonzalez, lead author of a study in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry and assistant professor of family medicine and public health at Wayne State University in Detroit.

"Studies have shown over and over that about half of people with depression get treatment, but as a clinician I knew that wasn't the case. I knew it wasn't the case for blacks and Latinos," continued Gonzalez, a Mexican American raised in New Mexico. "I wanted to see how many people were getting minimal standard-of-practice care."

The answer turned out to be that only a paltry one in five U.S. adults gets guideline-recommended treatment, with the number dropping to one in 10 for Mexican Americans and African Americans.

Depression "will be the leading cause of disability in the next 20 years, so if we want a healthy nation we need to address this," Gonzalez added.

This study draws attention to the extent to which adults, "especially ethnic and racial minorities, particularly Mexican Americans, who have major depression aren't receiving guideline-based treatments, and this is something we've been aware of for a while," said Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City.

The authors reviewed information on 15,762 adults aged 18 and over living in the 48 contiguous states.

Although about half of depressed individuals received some kind of care, only 21.3 percent had received at least one treatment during the past year meeting American Psychiatric Association guidelines.

Whereas previous research lumped different ethnic groups into one broad category, Latinos, these researchers looked at individual subgroups, revealing that Mexican Americans, African Americans and Caribbean blacks were even less likely to receive adequate care than others.