Extra Depression Care Helps Workers

Sept. 25, 2007 -- Depressed workers may feel better and accomplish more at work if they get a little extra help in addition to standard depression care.

That news appears in The Journal of the American Association.

Many employers may "experience a positive return on investment from outreach and enhanced treatment of depressed workers," write the researchers.

They included Philip Wang, MD, DrPH, of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Wang's team contacted thousands of employees at 16 large companies, including workers in the airline, insurance, banking, public utility, and manufacturing fields, as well as state government workers.

Interested employees completed surveys about their depression symptoms. Based on the results, the researchers focused on 604 depressed employees.

All of those depressed workers were eligible to get standard depression treatment. Roughly half also got a depression workbook and phone calls from trained counselors.

The counselors offered support and checked on the patients' progress, especially for depressed workers who refused to get in-person therapy.

Over the next year, the workers contacted by the phone counselors reported more improvement in their depression symptoms.

They also worked about two hours more per week than the other depressed workers and tended to keep their jobs.

Wang and colleagues call for further studies to see if the findings apply to other groups of workers, including people in blue-collar jobs

It is how much important to everyone?

In early September, "major newspapers reported the alarming news that suicides among young people were on the rise because of a precipitous drop in the use of antidepressants," writes Alison Bass. The academic study the news articles were based on concluded that new safety warnings for young people using antidepressant drugs had discouraged doctors from writing prescriptions for depressed youths. But there's a hole in that argument: "while there was indeed an upturn in suicide rates among youths ... the number of prescriptions for antidepressants in the same age group remained basically unchanged." Bass points out that the pharmaceutical companies that make antidepressants might "benefit from the latest alarm about an apparent upturn in youth suicide rates.
These companies have an enormous stake in reversing the current FDA warnings." Pfizer, which makes the antidepressant Zoloft and others, did provide $30,000 for the academic study, and the study's lead authors have ties to Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. "This isn't the first time that suicide rates have been trotted out as a public relations weapon," Bass adds. "Proponents of psychotropic drugs have long argued that suicide rates ... fell after" such drugs were introduced, though the decline began well before the drugs were widely prescribed.
It is how much important to everyone?