Florida Best Practice Psychotherapeutic Medication Guidelines for Adults With Major Depressive Disorder

Herein we provide the 2015 update for the Florida Best Practice Psychotherapeutic Medication Guidelines (FPG) for major depressive disorder (MDD). The FPG represent evidence-based decision support for practitioners providing care to adults with MDD.The consensus meeting included representatives from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (FAHCA), advocacy members, academic experts in MDD, and multidisciplinary mental health clinicians, as well as health policy experts. The FAHCA provided funding support for the FPG.Evidence was limited to results from adequately powered, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials; in addition, pooled-, meta-, and network-analyses were included. Recommendations were based on consensus arrived at by the multistakeholder Florida Expert Panel. Articles selected were identified on the electronic search engine PubMed with the dates 2010 to present. The search terms were major depressive disorder, psychopharmacology, antidepressants, psychotherapy, neuromodulation, complementary alternative medicines, pooled-analysis, meta-analysis, and network-analysis. Bibliographies of the identified articles were manually searched for additional citations not identified in the original search.A consensus meeting comprising all representatives took place on September 25-26, 2015, in Tampa, Florida. Guiding principles (eg, emphasis on the most rigorous evidence for efficacy, safety, and tolerability) were discussed, defined, and operationalized prior to review of extant data. As MDD often pursues a recurrent and chronic course, principles of practice, measurement-based care, and comprehensive assessment and management of overall physical and mental health were emphasized. Evidence supporting pretreatment major depressive episode specifiers (eg, mixed features, anxious distress) and the role of pharmacogenomics (and other biological-behavioral markers) in informing treatment selection were comprehensively discussed. Algorithmic priority was assigned to agents with relatively greater therapeutic index (ie, efficacy) and minimal propensity for safety and tolerability disadvantages.The updated 2015 FPG provide concise, pragmatic, evidence-based decision support for treatment selection and sequencing for adults with MDD. Principles of practice include measurement-based care, priority to both psychiatric and medical comorbidity, identification of DSM-5-defined specifiers (eg, mixed features), suicide risk assessment, and evaluation of cognitive symptoms. The FPG have purposefully aimed to minimize emphasis on "expert opinion" and instead differentially emphasized extant evidence for pharmacologic treatments.