Interpersonal psychotherapy: evaluation, support, triage

Abstract

Depression is highly prevalent and debilitating among medically ill patients. As high as one third of the primary practise patients screen positive for depression symptoms and over half of the patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder are treated in primary care. However, current primary care service arrangements do not efficiently triage patients who screen positive for depression into appropriate treatments that reflect their individual needs and preferences. In this paper, we describe a tool that aims to fill the gap between screening the patients for depression and triaging them to appropriate care. This is a three-session adaptation of interpersonal psychotherapy: ipt; evaluation, support, triage (IPT-EST). We first outline IPT-EST procedures that aim to provide structure and content to primary care practitioners who identify patients with positive depression symptoms, thus assisting the practitioners to explore the patients' psychosocial triggers of depression, give basic strategies to manage these interpersonal stressors and provide decisions tools about triaging patients with severe/persistent depression into appropriate treatment.