**9. Conclusion**

Depression is very common in patients with terminal or life-threatening illnesses in a palliative care setting. It is therefore important to diagnose it at a right time. Diagnosing it at a right time will result in effective treatment and could improve the symptoms. There could be many hurdles for the physician to diagnose it because of the overlapping with physical symptoms of the illness. The medical staff should be trained to give counseling to the patients. Many patients tend to resist their treatment because of a lack of social support from family and friends. Psychotherapy which includes various therapies like cognitive behavior therapy was found to be effective in the treatment procedure. Antidepressants when given to patients with depression but with no illness could be very effective but when given to patients with some advanced illness had severe side effects. Doctors must resist the use of drugs that tend to interact with other drugs because it could hamper the treatment of the patients. Social support from family and friends plays a crucial role in combatting depression as it increases the quality of life and gives meaning to live a life, lack of a support system could also be a reason for depression. When it comes to gender, women are the ones who tend to be more depressed than men. Young adolescents and adults when compared to people on the older side are more depressed. There is a lack of hope, suicidal tendencies in the patient with depression. Thus, depression could be a serious challenge in the palliative care settings due to various reasons and we need to deal with it in a more precise way.

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**Author details**

Manish Shandilya1

Gurugram, Haryana, India

, Soumya Sharma1

1 Amity School of Applied Sciences, Amity University Haryana,

2 ACOAST, Amity University Haryana, Gurugram, Haryana, India

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

3 National Brain Research Centre, Gurugram, Haryana, India

\*Address all correspondence to: sonu.mbhu@gmail.com

provided the original work is properly cited.

, Prabhu Prasad Das2

and Sonika Charak<sup>3</sup>

\*

*Depression: A Challenge during Palliative Care DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96563* *Depression: A Challenge during Palliative Care DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96563*

*Suggestions for Addressing Clinical and Non-Clinical Issues in Palliative Care*

which helps the patient to achieve peace of mind.

reasons and we need to deal with it in a more precise way.

**9. Conclusion**

certain limitation that it could identify only major depressive disorders [22]. For the assessment to be smooth and functioning, there should be well-equipped hospitals with improvised mechanisms and techniques and well-trained staff. When patients were openly asked about feeling depressed the responses recorded from most of the patients were less sensitive and showed false results because the patients tend to hide their illness because of them being stigmatized. The stigma of depression should be eradicated as it hampers the testing problem. To eradicate this stigmatization one must preach to everyone in the family and hospital staff, should organize some seminars and conduct workshops. Many of the medical staff and even doctors treating patients are not well aware of depression as a psychological illness. For the patients to be comfortable with the doctors and staff, there should be good interpersonal communication skills between both doctors and the patients, which could be established by a non-judgemental and emphatic behavior of doctors towards patients [31]. The mental and emotional support from friends and family to the patient at the time of illness could also help the patient to recover more likely than those who do not have it. In the hospital where nurses play a vital role and act as a bridge between doctors and patients, they need to be well trained and highly professional. Untrained staff and nurses in the hospital could be a major reason for prolonged and untreated depression in the patients. Once the depression is assessed, treatment methods could be both psychological and pharmacological. The major limitation of pharmacological drugs is it has certain side effects in some patients apart from treating depression [35, 47, 49, 51]. Patients who experience side effects from antidepressants or psychostimulants should be treated in combination with psychotherapy, yoga and meditation are also effective in the treatment process

Depression is very common in patients with terminal or life-threatening illnesses

in a palliative care setting. It is therefore important to diagnose it at a right time. Diagnosing it at a right time will result in effective treatment and could improve the symptoms. There could be many hurdles for the physician to diagnose it because of the overlapping with physical symptoms of the illness. The medical staff should be trained to give counseling to the patients. Many patients tend to resist their treatment because of a lack of social support from family and friends. Psychotherapy which includes various therapies like cognitive behavior therapy was found to be effective in the treatment procedure. Antidepressants when given to patients with depression but with no illness could be very effective but when given to patients with some advanced illness had severe side effects. Doctors must resist the use of drugs that tend to interact with other drugs because it could hamper the treatment of the patients. Social support from family and friends plays a crucial role in combatting depression as it increases the quality of life and gives meaning to live a life, lack of a support system could also be a reason for depression. When it comes to gender, women are the ones who tend to be more depressed than men. Young adolescents and adults when compared to people on the older side are more depressed. There is a lack of hope, suicidal tendencies in the patient with depression. Thus, depression could be a serious challenge in the palliative care settings due to various

**216**
