When Is Someone Truly Recovered from a Depression Episode?

Recent expert guidelines emphasize the importance of treating depression to “remission” and of clinicians not being satisfied with only improvement in symptoms. Still, how much improvement constitutes remission remains unclear. No studies have carefully compared long-term outcomes in depressed patients with mild residual symptoms against those with no symptoms. To fill this gap in knowledge, researchers used validated weekly ratings and ≤31 years of follow-up data on “recovered” patients from the Depression Collaborative Study.

Participants were 197 patients who were totally asymptomatic for 8 weeks and 125 patients with mild residual symptoms. Residual-symptoms patients had shorter time to relapse than asymptomatic patients (32 vs. 135 week…