Do Patient Requests for Antidepressants Enhance or Hinder Physicians’ Evaluation of Depression?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: We sought to ascertain whether patients' requests for antidepressants affect visit duration or history taking by primary care physicians (PCPs) for patients with depressive symptoms and a coexisting musculoskeletal disorder and to determine whether more thorough history taking is associated with diagnostic accuracy or with provision of minimally acceptable initial care for major depression. DESIGN: This was a randomized trial using standardized patients (SPs). Six roles involved 2 conditions (major depression and adjustment disorder, both with coexisting musculoskeletal conditions) and 3 patient request types (brand-specific, general, or none). We conducted the study in 152 PCP offices in Northern California and Rochester, New York. Physicians were assigned randomly to see 2 SPs with depression/wrist pain or adjustment disorder/back pain. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Physician history-taking for depression and the musculoskeletal condition; depression diagnosis in the medical record; antidepressant prescriptions/samples; referral/follow-up recommendations; visit duration; and provision of minimally acceptable initial depression care. RESULTS: General antidepressant requests were associated with more depression history-taking (Adjusted Parameter Estimate = 0.80 more questions of 10 (95% confidence interval = 0.31-1.29, P < 0.001); brand-specific requests were marginally associated with more depression history-taking (Adjusted Parameter Estimate = 0.45, 95% confidence interval = -0.04-0.93, P = 0.07). Antidepressant medication requests were not related to musculo-skeletal question asking (P > 0.3) or visit length (P > 0.8). Depression history taking was directly associated with the likelihood of a chart diagnosis of depression and the provision of minimally acceptable initial depression care. CONCLUSION: General antidepressant requests increase depression history taking, including screening for suicide. Patients' requests for medication do not appear to short-circuit history taking for depression or distract the physician's attention from coexisting musculoskeletal conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".