Assessment of Depression and Community Intervention

Assessment of Depression and Community Intervention

A depressed client would often manifest the condition in several ways, and hence, subjective and objective data would differ from one person to another. The essential objective data to assess from a client would be their temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, weight, height, and body mass index. It is essential to recognize that depression affects all the body systems concerned with the regulation of the given conditions. The subjective data to be screened from the patient would include pain episodes, sleeping problems, loss of appetite, reckless behaviour, and irritable behaviour.

There are, ideally, various screening tools that can be used to assess a client with depression. This discussion would only consider PHQ-9, which is one of the screening tools that are currently being used across the globe. Researchers and clinicians often utilize the given tool to conduct individual assessments and for purposes of large-scale reports. The tool has been developed in line with the 9 symptoms of depression described by the DSM-IV framework. All the clinicians who have ever used it acknowledge that this assessment model is reliable and valid.

Even with a high incidence of depression in my community, there are, unfortunately, very few community organizations that have been developed to help the affected people. From my research, PsychU is the only community organization that is at least doing its best to relieve individuals from mental disorders. It is an online as well as a community resource library with about 53,000 members.  The members include professional doctors, clinicians, nurses, psychiatrists, medical directors, care managers, pharmacists, administrators, insurers, among other mental health professionals. Their main objective is to increase collaboration, access to information, and participation in ongoing discussion with an attempt to promote mental health care and achieve positive patient outcomes.

Before the research, I hoped that I could find an organization that provides treatment and management for depressed individuals. But, as it stands now, there is no particular organization that is primarily dedicated to the treatment of depressed individuals.

References

Hinz, A., Mehnert, A., Kocalevent, R. D., Brähler, E., Forkmann, T., Singer, S., & Schulte, T. (2016). Assessment of depression severity with the PHQ-9 in cancer patients and the general population. BMC psychiatry, 16(1), 22.

Defossez, E. (2018). Unending Narrative, One-sided Empathy, and Problematic Contexts of Interaction in David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”. Journal of Medical Humanities, 39(1), 15-27.