Depression in the hospitalized inpatient with various medical illnesses.

The amount of depressive symptomatology in the medical population is high. Most of the symptomatology is, however, mild and probably represents an adjustment disorder with depression as a result of illness and hospitalization. Routine screening for depression in the hospitalized medically ill patient appears to be useful, given poor physician recognition of not only mild, but severe depressive symptomatology. Affective and cognitive symptoms of depression are the most discriminating for severe depression. Patients with bone and connective tissue disease, gastrointestinal disease, neurological disease, respiratory disease, and cancer appear to be the groups of diseases at greatest risk for serious depression in a tertiary care setting in the United States.