Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2736

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Smith E.
Aetna to help employers address workers' depression
Courier-Post 2005 Nov 3
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051104/BUSINESS/511040364/1003/BUSINESS

Keywords:
depression SSRIs Aetna

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

Articles like this horrify me.

They start off by delineating the cost to the economy of a particular illness- in this case depression, then imply that if every depressed person is detected and put on happy pills, the economy will boom again!

This is based on a false understanding of both the nature of unhappiness and the effects of SSRIs on the mind.

For a start anti-depressant medications are not very effective in alleviating depression and have only been shown to be of some benefit in a small proportion of adults with severe depression.
They do more harm than good in children and adolescents and do more harm than good in a large proportion of the adult population too.
The adverse effects of anti-depressants are often severe and deblilitating and can result in suicide or sucidal ideation.

If every-one who was defined as depressed, on the basis of a screening test were to be put on SSRIs, then the economy might well deteriorate due to the high incidence of incapacitating adverse effects.

Perhaps the employers who are backing this scheme should be looking instead at why their employees are so unhappy and improving the emotional ambience in the workplace rather than trying to displace responsibility onto a ‘chemical imbalance’ in the employees’ brains!

Full text:

Aetna to help employers address workers’ depression

By EILEEN SMITH
Courier-Post Staff

Depression drains lives.

It also saps the workplace of human energy, costing employers an estimated $83 billion a year, according to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

A major insurer will try to help workers to be happier, healthier and more productive through a program that pays physicians extra to screen patients for depression and provide follow-up care, if necessary.

Aetna is rolling out the program in six states, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The plan was prompted in part by employers, who listed depression as a major cause of absenteeism, said Aetna CEO John W. Roe, who is also a physician.

“The incidence of depression is a significant national problem,” Rowe said in a statement.

“Patients continue to forgo treatment of depression, and their illness can result in symptoms that diminish their quality of life and personal productivity. By focusing our program on an integrated care model at the primary care physician’s office, we can improve the likelihood that depression will be diagnosed early.”

Earlier this week, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, a nonprofit public advisory group, issued a report calling for collaboration between mental health professionals and family doctors, who write an estimated 65-75 percent of prescriptions for antidepressants.

Aetna said about 10 percent of the population suffers some sort of depression.

Under the program, the insurer will add an average of $15 to the $40 it typically pays to selected family-care physicians for office visits. Doctors will administer questionnaires to help screen for depression and will provide follow-up care if needed.

Reach Eileen Smith at (856) 486-2444 or esmith@courierpostonline.com
Published: November 04. 2005 3:00AM