Improving the care of depressed patients and preventing suicides. The European alliance against depression

Depression and Suicide a challenge for health care systems Major depression (MD) is a prevalent disorder with, in most cases, a recurrent or chronic course. According to the WHO (1,2) unipolar depression is projected to be ranked as one of the top two leading causes of disability adjusted life years in 2020. Depressive disorders are life threatening due to a high risk of suicidal behaviour and other direct and indirect contributions to mortality (3,4,5) and are responsible for a large part of the annually 54.000 completed suicides in Europe (6,7,8). But this is only the tip of the iceberg. For any suicide, about ten suicide attempts can be registered, which poses a considerable financial burden on the public health system (9).