Depression Consultant Expert System

Depression has been reported as one of the largest non-fatal mental disease affecting millions of people around the world. Some predictions indicate it could become the second common cause of global disability signifying it as a threat to human health. The growing number of sufferers from this type of mental illness and the paucity in the number of psychiatrists highlighted the importance of reducing and healing this illness. Refusal of depressive cases to seek psychological consultation further escalates the severity of the depression problem. Fear of social stigma associated with patients and high consultation fees are among reasons why many would not seek professional help. This paper describes DECES, an interactive self-help online expert system, developed to diagnose patients’ depressive conditions and provide recommendations to decrease their levels of depressions. The aim of the project is to capture expertise knowledge and make it available to sufferers, who are not seeking or procrastinate in getting help, to do self-assessing and obtain advice at their own convenience. Decision flowchart was used to represent expertise knowledge and further extracted into production rules as the knowledge base for the system. A comparison of the system’s diagnosis using real cases with psychologists’ diagnosis on similar cases revealed a high degree of correspondence. The results of a survey on the system functionality and usability aspects yield positive responses from majority of the respondents