At its December 2019 meeting, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Board of Trustees approved "The American Psychiatric Association Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with Schizophrenia." The full guideline is available at APA's Practice Guidelines website.

The CES-D and the GDS have excellent properties for use as screening instruments for major depression in older primary care patients. Because the GDS's yes or no format may ease administration, primary care clinicians should consider its routine use in their practices.

The peer-reviewed literature provides no evidence that current measurement tools can assess the competencies independently of one another. Because further efforts are unlikely to be successful, the authors recommend using the competencies to guide and coordinate specific evaluation efforts, rather than attempting to develop instruments to measure the competencies directly.

Mood disorders are the most common psychiatric problem associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), and have a negative impact on disability and quality of life. Accurate diagnosis of depressive disturbances in PD is critical and will facilitate the testing and use of new interventions; however, there are no clear diagnostic criteria for depressive disorders in PD. In their current form, strict Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria are difficult to use in PD and require attribution of specific symptoms to PD itself or the depressive syndrome. Additionally, DSM criteria for major depression and dysthymia exclude perhaps half of PD patients with comorbid clinically significant depression. This review summarizes an NIH-sponsored workshop and describes recommended changes to DSM diagnostic criteria for depression for use in PD. Participants also recommended: (1) an inclusive approach to symptom assessment to enhance reliability of ratings in PD and avoid the need to attribute symptoms to a particular cause; (2) the inclusion of subsyndromal depression in clinical research studies of depression of PD; (3) the specification of timing of assessments for PD patients with motor fluctuations; and (4) the use of informants for cognitively impaired patients. The proposed diagnostic criteria are provisional and intended to be defined further and validated but provide a common starting point for clinical research in PD-associated depression.

This study provides Class I evidence that paroxetine and venlafaxine XR are effective in treating depression in patients with PD.