A systematic review of online depression screening tools for use in the South African context

South African Journal of Psychiatry

 
 
Field Value
 
Title A systematic review of online depression screening tools for use in the South African context
 
Creator Hassem, Tasneem Laher, Sumaya
 
Subject Public health; Psychology; Psychiatry BDI-II; CES-D; depression; major depressive disorder; PHQ-9; screening tool
Description Background: According to the World Health Organization, the alarming increase in rates of depression globally has become a serious concern. In 2010, the prevalence rate of depression in South Africa was 4.6%. Given the context of South Africa where the majority of the population have limited access to healthcare facilities and 59.3% of the population have access to the Internet, an online depression screening tool would have much to offer.Objective: To determine whether online depression screening tools would be suitable for use in South Africa.Methods: This study presents a systematic review of online depression screening tools to determine whether one would be suitable for use in South Africa. Articles were accessed from seven electronic databases from 1970 to 2018. All articles included in the review were critically appraised.Results: A total of 17 articles met the inclusion criteria. From the results, there was only one screening tool available on an open access platform for use by the general population. The most common depression online screening tools were the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), the Center for Epidemiology Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). It was also evident that there were negligible differences in the psychometric properties of online versus paper versions of the online screening tools. Furthermore, there were very few studies that considered the African or South African population and no online screening tools for major depressive disorder (MDD) developed in these contexts.Conclusion: There appears to be a need for a depression screening tool to be adapted for online usage in South Africa. It is recommended that the online screening tool should be adapted from the three commonly used online depression screening tools: PHQ-9, CES-D and BDI-II.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor National research foundation South Africa
Date 2019-11-12
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Systematic review
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajpsychiatry.v25i0.1373
 
Source South African Journal of Psychiatry; Vol 25 (2019); 8 pages 2078-6786 1608-9685
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/article/view/1373/1553 https://sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/article/view/1373/1552 https://sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/article/view/1373/1554 https://sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/article/view/1373/1551
 
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Rights Copyright (c) 2019 Tasneem Hassem https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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