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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Hamish McAllister-WilliamsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© 2020Background: Many depressed patients are not able to achieve or sustain symptom remission despite serial treatment trials – often termed “treatment resistant depression”. A broader, perhaps more empathic concept of “difficult-to-treat depression” (DTD) was considered. Methods: A consensus group discussed the definition, clinical recognition, assessment and management implications of the DTD heuristic. Results: The group proposed that DTD be defined as “depression that continues to cause significant burden despite usual treatment efforts”. All depression management should include a thorough initial assessment. When DTD is recognized, a regular reassessment that employs a multi-dimensional framework to identify addressable barriers to successful treatment (including patient-, illness- and treatment-related factors) is advised, along with specific recommendations for addressing these factors. The emphasis of treatment, in the first instance, shifts from a goal of remission to optimal symptom control, daily psychosocial functional and quality of life, based on a patient-centred approach with shared decision-making to enhance the timely consideration of all treatment options (including pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, neurostimulation, etc.) to optimize outcomes when sustained remission is elusive. Limitations: The recommended definition and management of DTD is based largely on expert consensus. While DTD would seem to have clinical utility, its specificity and objectivity may be insufficient to define clinical populations for regulatory trial purposes, though DTD could define populations for service provision or phase 4 trials. Conclusions: DTD provides a clinically useful conceptualization that implies a search for and remediation of specific patient-, illness- and treatment obstacles to optimizing outcomes of relevance to patients.
Author(s): McAllister-Williams RH, Arango C, Blier P, Demyttenaere K, Falkai P, Gorwood P, Hopwood M, Javed A, Kasper S, Malhi GS, Soares JC, Vieta E, Young AH, Papadopoulos A, Rush AJ
Publication type: Review
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Affective Disorders
Year: 2020
Volume: 267
Pages: 264-282
Print publication date: 15/04/2020
Online publication date: 07/02/2020
Acceptance date: 06/02/2020
ISSN (print): 0165-0327
ISSN (electronic): 1573-2517
Publisher: Elsevier B.V.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.02.023
DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.02.023
