This limitation also means that we were unable to estimate the severity of symptoms at the time the antidepressant was started. Table 3 showed that some respondents with a mild episode of MDD received treatment with antidepressants. The guideline at time of the study does not differentiate between mild and moderate to severe depressive episodes in its recommendations, but more recent guidelines do. For Thapsigargin example the new Dutch multidisciplinary depression guideline is much more conservative and recommends to reserve treatment with antidepressants for patients with more severe depressive states. It is unclear whether the patients with mild symptomatology at baseline had more severe symptomatology at the time the antidepressant treatment was initiated. A final limitation is the cross-sectional design of the study, as a result of which the start of symptoms and time of remission could not be determined precisely. We allowed treatment with antidepressants in case of a MDD in the past year. In some cases treatment probably should have been stopped before the interview, because the patient had been in remission for 6 months. Because of the cross-sectional design, we also had to rely on recall of symptoms of depression and anxiety during the past year and for lifetime diagnoses. Several researchers have questioned the reliability of retrospective recall of symptoms during a single interview in persons with a history of depression. Several previous studies also looked at rates of overtreatment,DCMU with various outcomes. The major contrast with our study is that these studies only looked at relative small groups of GP patients and did not allow recalculation of the results to the total population of GP patients. Two of the previous studies found high rates of overtreatment: 25% and even 35%. Berardi et al. described a group of 361 primary care patients of whom 82 used an antidepressant.