Treatment Seeking for Depression in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Cross-country comparisons of patterns of mental health treatment seeking provide insights into the impact of contextual factors on mental health service use. This study aimed to compare prevalence and predictors of mental health treatment seeking among adults with major depression in Canada and the United States. METHODS: Data for 751 participants with a probable major depressive episode in the past 12 months were drawn from the 2002-2003 Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health: 304 were from Canada and 447 were from the United States. Probable major depressive episodes were ascertained by the Composite International Diagnostic Interview-Short-Form. Patterns of contacts with mental health and general health providers for mental health reasons were compared. RESULTS: Prevalence of contacts with any provider for mental health problems was similar among participants with a probable major depressive episode in Canada and the United States (181 Canadians, or 56 percent, compared with 245 Americans, or 52 percent). Canadian participants were more likely than those in the United States to seek treatment for mental health problems from family doctors and general practitioners, and among participants who sought such treatment, Canadians were more likely to also seek treatment from mental health professionals. In both countries, racial or ethnic minorities were less likely than Caucasians to seek treatment. Depression severity was more closely associated with treatment seeking in Canada than in the United States. CONCLUSIONS: Although studies from the early 1990s showed higher rates of treatment seeking for depression in Canada than in the United States, the more recent data presented here do not show such a gap. However, differences persist in the use of various providers. Compared with the United States, Canada had a closer match between depression severity and treatment, which suggests more efficient allocation of mental health care resources for treatment of depression in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".