Primary care psychiatry: pertinent Arabian perspectives

There is substantive evidence of significant psychiatric morbidity among primary care patients, mainly in the form of anxiety and depressive disorders. A careful critical approach is essential for ensuring the cultural relevance, validity and reliability of the psychiatric screening instruments used to identify such morbidity. Most psychiatric morbidity among primary care patients passes undetected by the primary care practitioners. This will inevitably lead to unnecessary investigation and medication and the continuation of suffering for patients. Comorbidity and physical presentation in most instances contribute significantly to failure to detect psychiatric disorders. To deal with this problem of hidden psychiatric morbidity, carefully designed educational and training programmes need to be tailored to address the particular weaknesses and needs of primary care doctors

Depression in primary health care

This study is part of a comprehensive project investigating psychiatric morbidity and relevant psychiatric instruments at a primary health care setting in Al Ain, United Areb Emirates [U.A.E]. The aim was to investigate the group of depressive disorders identified from within the identified cases of minor psychiatric morbidity in the studied primary health care sample. Depressive disorders constituted 70% of the total identified minor psychiatric morbidity. Out of all identified cases 55% were suffering from neurotic depression, 1.7% endogenous depression and 13% from anxiety-depressive states. Females outnumbered males in all types of depressive disorders