The Prevention of Depression

As medical costs skyrocket and health issues inspire heated national debate, preventive health care has received increasing attention and emphasis. In the area of mental health, however, the subject of effective prevention has remained controversial and generally neglected. Now, the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Institute of Medicine are conducting systematic reviews of the state of prevention science in the mental health field. Contributing to this growing attention and offering the most comprehensive summary to date of this new area of study, "The Prevention of Depression" presents and evaluates the current research on efforts to prevent what many still consider to be the "inevitable suffering" that is associated with depressive disorders. Ricardo Munoz and Yu-Wen Ying bring together the latest information about depression and review current methods of evaluating medical and psychological intervention.
Chapters are organized in five sections: an introduction to key concepts, an explanation of the steps to be followed in conducting research on preventive interventions, a report on the authors' work with the San Francisco Depression Prevention Research Project, discussion of the implications of such research and the goals of the prevention field, and general comments and recommendations directed to mental health professionals. The authors conclude with a call for well-designed prevention programmes to reduce the human suffering associated with depression.