[Is there evidence that depression screening benefits patients with medical illness?: not yet]

Depression is increasingly recognized as a common and disabling condition, and improving depression care has been prioritized by policy-makers in Germany and elsewhere. Screening for depression, which refers to the routine use of depression screening tools or sets of questions to identify patients who may have depression, but whose depression is otherwise not recognized by their physician, is one solution that has been proposed. However, there has never been a clinical trial that has found better depression outcomes for patients screened for depression compared to patients not screened when the same treatment and care resources are made available to both groups. There are, on the other hand, many negative trials that have failed to find benefit to patients from depression screening. Thus, depression screening has not been shown to benefit patients, may lead to important harm, and would consume a substantial amount of scarce resources. Prior to recommending that physicians routinely screen patients for depression, well-designed randomized controlled trials are needed that compare depression outcomes for patients screened versus patients not screened with the same treatment options available to both screened and non-screened patients.