The Prevention of Anxiety and Depression: Theory, Research and Practice
Summary
Chapter 2 provides an excellent overview of the descriptive features of anxiety and mood disorders, their impact, and their prevalence and course. The authors then present a cogent analysis of these data, specifying their implications for prevention. The importance of prevention becomes startlingly clear when the authors note that a) most anxiety and mood disorders originate in childhood; b) childhood onset is associated with greater severity and functional impairment; c) disorders in children are undertreated; d) anxiety disorders appear to precede depression, but anxiety disorders are generally undertreated; and, e) subclinical symptomatology reliably predicts the development of clinically significant impairment but is grossly underdetected. The authors also identify important lapses in our understanding of the development of anxiety and mood disorders. For example, why is the prevalence of mood disorders so much higher in women? Why are anxiety and depression so highly related? This chapter serves to establish the critical role that prevention has to play in reducing the prevalence of anxiety and mood disorders; prevention is clearly the wave of the future. Chapters 3 and 4 review the challenges involved in studying prevention. In Chapter 3, the issue of measuring the impact of prevention strategies is addressed. The authors provide a thorough review of the issues relevant to measurement of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. The chapter concludes with an inclusive description of existing measures of depression and anxiety, broken down by applicability to primary, secondary or tertiary intervention. Chapter 4 discusses the challenges of designing prevention research, which include identification of the risk factors that the prevention intervention is to target, identification of the sample that is to receive the intervention, and identification of how the intervention's efficacy will be measured. The chapter reviews the numerous considerations required before making any decisions about what to treat, who to treat, and how to assess the treatment's impact.
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Extract
The Prevention of Anxiety and Depression: Theory, Research and Practice
DAVID J. A. DOZOIS and KEITH S. DOBSON (Eds.) The Prevention of Anxiety and Depression: Theory, Research and Practice Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004, 344 pages (ISBN 1-59147-079-X, $49.95 Hardcover)
Psychological and pharmacological treatments of anxiety and depression have evolved considerably in the past decade. The increase in the range of psychoactive medicatio...See the full content of this document
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