ABSTRACT
Depression screening in the United States can be traced back to 1991, the first National Depression Screening Day. This day was established by Screening for Mental Health, Inc., with the financial backing of major pharmaceutical corporations. Interestingly, while many academics and administrators wish to resolve debates in mental health practice on the grounds of evidence—this whole movement for Evidence-Based Medicine attempts to apply a very reduced Anglo-American “empiricism” in the care of patients to the exclusion of any other values or ethics—there is little significant evidence to support this practice of depression screening. Each moment carries within it one more effort for greater morality for all, in a well-nigh Weberian logic, extending moral control from that of behaviors such as drunkenness into the psyche itself, with an increasing alliance with science to bolster these programs, even when science itself offers no support for practices such as depression screening.
