About the Journal

Why the Two Halves Are One Journal

A journal can be organized around a disorder or around a treatment. This one is organized around the join between them, and its name says so.

Depression is studied by people who rarely share a method. A neuroscientist tracing a circuit, a trialist testing a psychotherapy, an epidemiologist measuring the effect of unemployment and a clinician describing a single case are asking different questions with different instruments. What they have in common is the condition and, sooner or later, what can be done about it. Separating those literatures makes each one easier to publish and harder to use.

The journal's premise is that the two halves inform each other in both directions: a mechanism becomes interesting when it suggests where a treatment acts, and a treatment becomes interpretable when something is known about why it works, for whom, and under what conditions. Research that moves in either direction belongs here, and research that does only one of the two is not asked to do the other.

That premise has a practical consequence for authors. A manuscript is read for the relation it examines rather than for the field it comes from — depression set against a mechanism, a treatment, another diagnosis, a stage of life, a social circumstance, a system of care, or a way of measuring it.

Depression alongside What Is Done About It

The subject areas that follow from this, and the boundary of the remit, are set out in full on the aims and scope page.

What Editorial Responsibility Means Here

Every decision on a manuscript is made by a named editor working with independent reviewers, under policies that are published rather than implied.

An Editor-in-Chief and an international editorial board carry responsibility for the journal's scholarly standards. Each member's affiliation, country, research interests and, where registered, ORCID iD are published on the editorial board page, so a reader can see who is accountable and check their record independently.

All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.

Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. Those decisions are independent of any fee, membership, editorial role or optional service: nothing an author pays for changes how their manuscript is assessed. Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently.

The full arrangements — authorship, ethics, consent, competing interests, data availability, corrections and retractions — are set out in the editorial policies.