Satisfaction and Depression in German Primary Care Doctors

Abstract

This issue of the Deutsches Arzteblatt International contains the reports of two studies on job satisfaction (1) and mental health (2) among primary care doctors. These studies appear to have yielded contradictory findings. Primary care doctors’ dissatisfaction with the health-care system was already revealed in an earlier publication (3). The study by Unrath et al. goes farther, showing what seems at first glance to be a link between job dissatisfaction and depression in this subset of physicians. The depressive symptoms that were assessed by the instrument used in this study (a questionnaire) do not merely reflect the sadness from which we all suffer now and then: This becomes obvious from the fact that 17.5% of the respondents said they had taken a psychoactive drug at least once in the past year—a third of them regularly. Thus, among the one-third of the primary care doctors surveyed who responded to the questionnaire, the prevalence of poor mental health seems worrisome, and considerably higher than in the general population. Some allowance must be made, however, for the methodological difficulty of comparing results across different population studies.