The GPs in this study, and thus their patients, may not be representative for all Dutch primary care practices, as these practices/GPs agreed to participate in the NESDA study, and thus have interest in psychiatric research. This may be associated with a better compliance to the guidelines for depression and for anxiety disorders. Next to that, according to the SFK about 760,000 Dutchmen were prescribed an antidepressant in the last 6 months of 2005. In our primary care sample we recalculated that 8.5% used an antidepressant. This higher percentage may be explained by the fact that respondents were selected among the patients who consulted their GP in the last four months. The non-response to the screening KPT330 Selinexor questionnaire did not seem to be biased with regard to psychopathology. Fourth, we did not have access to the full electronic patient file from the GPs. Therefore we did not know why they prescribed an antidepressant. This might have been of interest, as antidepressants can also be prescribed for other indications than depression or anxiety disorder. Some antidepressants including TCAs at low dose for example are used for neuropathic pain. However, if any effect, this would result in an ever lower estimation of overtreatment with antidepressants in our sample. In addition, we could not determine the ground on which the GPs based their treatment decisions, therefore we could not determine if a decision to continue an antidepressant was according to guideline recommendations. This applies especially to the category ‘possibly justified’ in patients who had recovered from a recurrent depressive episode more than two years ago, as we do not have information as to why the antidepressant was continued in these patients. Among them are definitely patients who continue their antidepressants for good reasons,Verdinexor patients who had stopped their antidepressant after a recurrent episode and who developed a new recurrence, and patients who tapered off and subsequently developed minor symptoms and therefore restarted medication.