Depression and Anxiety: Your Treatment History Is Research Data

Every figure in this guide comes from a published source, linked where it appears and most of them kept in CureCircle's evidence base with the source's own words. It is not medical advice. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line now.

Depression and anxiety are among the most common health conditions in the world, and among the best studied. There are effective treatments for both. And yet for many people, finding the one that works is a long process of trying, waiting, adjusting and trying again. That process, what was tried, in what order, and what finally helped, is exactly what research needs more of, and it lives mostly in people's own memory.

How many people live with them

According to the WHO, approximately 322 million people in the world have depression, and in 2023, 470 million people in the world had an anxiety disorder, making anxiety disorders the most common of all mental disorders.

Effective treatment exists, but most people never get it. The WHO notes that "in high-income countries, only about one third of people with depression receive mental health treatment", and that "although highly effective treatments for anxiety disorders exist, only about 1 in 4 people in need (27.6%) receive any treatment".

Finding what works takes steps

The clearest evidence of how long the search can take comes from STAR*D, one of the largest studies of depression treatment in everyday care. Patients who did not recover on one treatment moved to the next. The remission rates were 36.8%, 30.6%, 13.7%, and 13.0% for the first, second, third, and fourth treatment steps, and the overall cumulative remission rate was 67%.

In plain terms: most people did not recover on the first treatment, a third had still not recovered after four, and each further step helped fewer people. Which treatment will work for which person is still one of the big open questions in mental health. Answering it needs exactly what people who have been through it know: what they tried first, how long they gave it, what happened, and what they tried next.

The records worth keeping

Clinical guidelines describe how treatment is meant to be followed, and each step leaves a record:

• Questionnaire scores. NICE recommends that clinicians consider using a validated measure when assessing a person with suspected depression and use routine outcome monitoring with validated sessional outcome measures, for example PHQ-9. For anxiety, it suggests the 2-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-2) and routine outcome measures during treatment. A series of scores over months shows the course of an illness as nothing else does.
• Medication reviews. For depression, treatment review at least every 6 months for people continuing with antidepressant medication; for generalised anxiety, a review of a medicine's effectiveness and side effects every 2 to 4 weeks during the first 3 months and every 3 months thereafter.
• Lab tests for some medicines, such as lithium, where NICE asks for weight, renal and thyroid function and calcium levels at least every 6 months.

If you have done the PHQ-9 or GAD-7 questionnaires in therapy or with your doctor, ask for your scores: they are part of your record. You can request a copy of your records from your clinic.

What sharing it is worth

CureCircle values every contribution with a public benchmark built from what health data has sold for. On the benchmark today, a complete story with a year of the records the guidelines list comes to about $103 per licence for depression and $130 per licence for anxiety. A depression story with a year of monthly questionnaire scores (12 PHQ-9 results) comes to about $134 per licence: repeated validated scores are exactly the kind of measured, comparable data research uses to tell which treatments work. You can value your own and see every source on the depression and anxiety pages.

Your privacy comes first

Mental health data is among the most sensitive data there is, so it is worth knowing exactly what is shared. On CureCircle, the research record is de-identified: no names of people, doctors or clinics, no place finer than a country, no exact dates, and your age only as a range. You read the summary before anything is submitted, you consent story by story, and you can withdraw at any time. Read how de-identification works and what it cannot promise.

How to share it

You start by writing what you live with in your own words; a few quick questions follow, then an AI interviewer asks about the details only you know, and you rate every treatment you tried, including the ones that did not work. You can add letters, prescriptions and questionnaire results as PDFs or photos, and the AI reads them into your own medical file.

What you went through to find what works is the evidence that could make the search shorter for someone else. Start your story, or read what your health data is worth first.