Google Invites Users To 'Check If You're Clinically Depressed' (theverge.com)

Google will now invite U.S. users to "check if you're clinically depressed" by using a clinically-validated screening questionnaire. "The move announced on Wednesday comes out of work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and represents the first time that the search giant has promoted a mental health self-assessment tool in search results," reports Financial Times. From the report: The intervention by the world's most popular search engine comes as people increasingly seek medical advice online: Google says one in 20 searches are health-related, although it will not disclose what proportion are about depression. It is also the latest public move by a technology business to take greater responsibility for content that users see on its platform, after criticism that companies such as Facebook and Google failed to help people distinguish verified from false information. A box of verified information about symptoms and treatments for clinical depression already tops U.S. Google search results for "depression" or queries such as "do I have depression." Google does this for other common conditions, including flu and tonsillitis, and symptoms such as headaches, using information provided by the Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical organization. But for depression it has added a link inviting users to "check if you're clinically depressed." This takes searchers to a questionnaire widely used by doctors to measure levels of depressive symptoms. People who complete the test get a score indicating the severity of their symptoms, which can aid a physician's diagnosis.

Comments

Re:Great Idea

[BarbaraHudson]

It's a self-administered test - you do NOT need to go through google. The link to the US National Library of Medicine paper with the test and how to score it is here. The relevant section:

Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?
0=Not at all,1=Several days,2=More than half the days,3=Nearly every day

1. Little interest or pleasure in doing things 0 1 2 3
2. Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless 0 1 2 3
3. Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much 0 1 2 3
4. Feeling tired or having little energy 0 1 2 3
5. Poor appetite or overeating 0 1 2 3
6. Feeling bad about yourself—or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down 0 1 2 3
7. Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television 0 1 2 3
8. Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite—being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual 0 1 2 3
9. Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way 0 1 2 3 The total is your score.

Interpreting the score:

The vast majority of patients (93%) with no depressive disorder had a PHQ-9 score less than 10, while most patients (88%) with major depression had scores of 10 or greater. Scores less than 5 almost always signified the absence of a depressive disorder; scores of 5 to 9 predominantly represented patients with either no depression or subthreshold (i.e., other) depression; scores of 10 to 14 represented a spectrum of patients; and scores of 15 or greater usually indicated major depression.

In other words, this is something that any web monkey could bang out in a really short time, so don't be too impressed with the Googles. With the ready availability of web-based tests based on the PHQ-9, there is absolutely NO need for yet another one, so it looks like this is just to start getting people used to the idea of handing over their medical info directly to Google.