Depression's cardinal symptoms are often invisible to the patient reporting them. Dr. Harding and Dr. Citrome examine why diagnosis, not treatment, remains psychiatry's hardest task, and how family observation and screening for bipolar depression change the diagnostic path.
Many symptoms that most impair patients with major depressive disorder go unspoken until treatment starts working, making early recognition and patient-defined goals central to effective care.
Precision medicine looks different in psychiatry than in oncology. The panel discusses why personalizing MDD care starts with a complete patient history, and how clinical experience, evidence, and patient goals combine to guide treatment.
A PHQ-9 score can mislead as easily as it clarifies. The panel unpacks the gap between rating-scale remission and how patients actually experience recovery, using real cases where appearances and scores diverged sharply.
Standardized rating scales define response and remission in clinical trials, but Erin Crown argues real recovery means returning fully to the life a patient had before depression began.
Standardized questionnaires matter, but Erin Crown leans on detailed conversation about a patient's daily routines to catch functional changes that no scale fully captures.
More than half of patients treated for depression don't believe full remission is achievable. The panel explores what success should mean to the patient in front of you, and why patients rarely admit they've stopped taking a medication.
A patient's improving score does not always translate into a patient who feels better, and Erin Crown explains how anhedonia and cognitive symptoms account for the gap.
