Comorbidity of depressive and anxiety disorders: challenges in diagnosis and assessment

SUMMARY: Comorbid anxiety is common in patients with depressive disorders. It complicates the clinical presentation of depressive disorders and can contribute to treatment resistance. Clinicians can assess the degree of overlap between depressive and anxiety symptoms either by measuring the severity of anxiety symptoms in individuals who meet diagnostic criteria for depression or by determining whether or not an individual with depression simultaneously meets criteria for an anxiety disorder. However, multiple factors in the Chinese clinical setting make it difficult to accurately assess patients with comorbid conditions. The resultant under-diagnosis of comorbid depression and anxiety – the most common type of comorbid psychiatric condition in China – seriously diminishes the effectiveness of treatments for common mental disorders in the country. We argue that the widespread use of valid and reliable dimensional assessment tools in Chinese clinical settings will help improve the diagnosis and treatment of the many individuals who have concurrent depressive and anxiety symptoms.