Depression and medical illness

Abstract

There are medical diseases that associate a depressive syndrome in their evolution, which can on occasions precede the somatic symptoms. This article offers a description of the importance of depressive syndromes in the care of a patient with medical pathology. After analysing the mode of presentation of the depressive symptomology in medical patients, as well as the different diagnostic keys that make it possible to avoid mistaken or incomplete diagnoses, it deals with the relationship between depressive symptoms and numerous pathologies. Finally, it reviews those psychiatric disorders that frequently associate unspecific medical symptoms with depressive anxiety syndrome, which end up complicating the handling of these patients. The article does not aim to analyse those depressive pictures that are reactive to the difficulties of some patients in assuming their role as patients with an illness, or the limitations that certain disorders, treatments or prognoses might entail.