The first E-Mental Health Summit will be held in The Netherlands in Amsterdam. You can find the programme on the E-Mental Health website. The 4th ISRII Meeting will be held specially for members of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions. This meeting will be chaired by Prof Dr Pim Cuijpers. His name might be familiar to you because I often discuss his work on my blog. Some suitable examples: Self-Help Treatment for Depressive symptoms, which is the best? and Screening Adolescents for Depression on the Internet. Besides this meeting, the results of the most recent evidence-based developments, research studies .....read more »

In the recent numbers of British Journal of General Practice articles were published about depression in General Practice. In The Netherlands about 80% of patients with a depression visit the GP. In The Netherlands it's estimated that in 2003 about 856.000 people in a year suffer from depression. That's 6.3% on a population of 16 million people in a year. Of these 80% of depressed visiting the GP 66% receives a treatment of which 50% solely in primary care. A recent meta-analysis of randomized studies examining psychological treatments in primary care depressed patients was published in the British Journal .....read more »

For depression several self help treatment options are available. In short mutual self help groups, cognitive behavioral therapy and problem solving therapy are the most important Mutual help groups provide limited but promising evidence that mutual help groups benefit people with three types of problems: chronic mental illness, depression/anxiety, and bereavement. Cognitive behavioral therapy is very efficient as self help treatment, its structured format makes it very suitable for self-help purposes and it can be very efficacious for the treatment of depression. Problem solving therapy (PST) is another option for self help in depression. Recently, a new, generic, PST-based intervention for multiple .....read more »

An increasing number of randomized controlled studies have clearly demonstrated that psychological interventions are effective in the treatment of depression. This can also be seen from the above figure: number of studies from 1970 to 2005 in the world (red line), and in the United States (blue line). A Dutch research group has made a database available of controlled and comparative outcome studies on psychological treatments of depression. The database can be accessed freely through the Internet. The data on the 149 included studies are presented in order to give other researchers access to the studies we collected, and to give background information .....read more »

Screening for depression through the Internet is feasible and is acceptable to large groups of adolescents. Furthermore, the Major Depression Inventory (MDI) and the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale for Children (pdf, small) (CES-D) are reliable and valid instruments that can be used for this screening.By the age of 18 about one in every four adolescents has had at least onedepressive episode, and most adults with recurrent depression have their initial depressive episodes as teenagersTeen depression or depression during adolescence can be hard to discover. There is even a website about depression for children and parents: KidsHealth. It is a .....read more »