All teens should be screened for depression!

All primary care doctors, including pediatricians and family physicians, should screen adolescents routinely for depression, new recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said, and those doctors should have a system in place to connect young people to treatment for depression if they need it - reports CNN.

The new recommendations for screening adolescents "very much parallel the recommendations for adults (18 and older)," said Dr. Alex H. Krist, associate professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and member of the Task Force that wrote the recommendations, which came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Screening adolescents is not difficult, Maslow said. "I don't think it's that much more complex than the things [doctors] are already doing."

But the payoff is big. "The biggest challenge is identifying adolescents." They might look fine but "without screening they fall thru the cracks and don't come to attention until the symptoms get worse," Dr. Gary Maslow, an assistant professor of pediatrics and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University said. "I think we have medications and therapies that are effective."