The quality and accessibility of Australian depression sites on the World Wide Web

Objectives: To provide information about Australian depression sites and the quality of their content; to identify possible indicators of the quality of site content; and determine the accessibility of Australian depression web sites. Design: Cross-sectional survey of 15 Australian depression web sites. Main outcome measures: (i) Quality of treatment content (concordance of site information with evidence-based guidelines, number of evidence-based treatments recommended, discussion of other relevant issues, subjective rating of treatment content); (ii) potential quality indicators (conformity with DISCERN criteria, citation of scientific evidence); (iii) accessibility (search engine rank). Results: Mean content quality scores were not high and site accessibility was poor. There was a consistent association between the quality-of-content measures and the DISCERN and scientific accountability scores. Search engine rank was not associated with content quality. Conclusions: The quality of information about depression on Australian websites could be improved. DISCERN may be a useful indicator of website quality, as may scientific accountability. The sites that received the highest quality-of-content ratings were beyondblue, BluePages, CRUfAD and InfraPsych.