Abstract:
Over 40% of the one billion people globally using the Internet search for health information.
Depression is reported to be the second most common cause of global disability by 2020. More people search for
health information on depression than on cancer or heart disease, even though the latter have higher prevalence
rates. However, the quality of this information is an issue. The authors have developed a Health Website Quality
Checklist for the health information consumer, which is specifically tailored for evaluating depression information
on the internet, as this is a highly sought after topic. Most criteria listings found were too cumbersome to use,
overlapped in some aspects, but lacked others, and importantly, were not tailored to depression. This study is an
important development given the growing prevalence of depression, the increasing number of Internet users and
that a lot of people use the Internet specifically for searching on Health Information. Further research needs to be
conducted to refine and validate the checklist used in this evaluation.
