Here is also some more recent (as-yet-mostly-unrealized) ideas (put together for a 2013 Knight News Challenge) towards helping people make sense of their own health issues (depression or whatever they may be) when confronted with a mass of often conflicting information often dispensed by people with undisclosed conflicts of interest:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161104203536/https://www.newsc...
"We want to improve public health through free and open source public intelligence tools for individual and collective sensemaking about health topics -- especially related to nutrition and lifestyle... When confronted with a health issue, many people turn to their doctor, the internet, or friends for advice. But then what do you and your family do with all the advice you receive? What do even health professionals do with all the often conflicting information out there when they research a patient's health issues? We want to create software that helps with that challenge by making it easier for individuals and communites to collect health information (from whatever public sources including the internet), organize it, prioritize it, reason about it, act on it, and feed back the results of action into a next iteration as a learning experience."

Here is a motivational example about salt intake from that proposal, but it could just as well be about understanding depression and various options as they apply in your own life:

====

For example, consider the question of how much salt of what type is good for a specific person (you) to eat every day? How easy is it to begin to research that for yourself? How long would it take, even with a web browser and search engine at your finger tips? How would you know which study to trust and how much -- including based on who funded them or how carefully the work was done? How could the online community help organize all that information for you? If it was organized, how would any general advice you found about salt consumption apply to your own specific situation and lifestyle and family history? Would the amount of salt you needed matter based on how much you exercised, or where you lived, or whether you went outdoors a lot, or whether you ate a lot of fruits and vegetables? How would you answer the question of whether there other health factors in play that may make some people sensitive to salt, and perhaps if you improve those, maybe salt intake won't matter much? How have opinions about that changed over time? If you try changing how much salt you eat, how should you interpret any changes in how you feel?

There may well be "experts" out there who know good answers for these questions specifically about salt, but they probably are not you personally. Statistically there might be a small number of experts out of billions of people, so most people thinking about how much salt to eat are not going to be experts. So, almost everyone is left wondering which experts to trust? Even if all the experts agree, they could still be wrong, or their general advice might be easy to misinterpret for your particular situation. And if you specifically by chance are an expert on salt intake, then you probably are not an expert on phytonutrient intake or cancer treatments, and so you would be faced with this same issue in some other area of personal health. So, there can be a gap between what an expert (or community of experts) know, and what an individual or local community knows and then acts on. Part of the value of better software tools, including educational aspects, may be to help bridge that gap between expert knowledge and individual practice.

This recently temporarily "withdrawn" article on "Reduced dietary salt for the prevention of cardiovascular disease" due to "doubts raised about the integrity of research" is an a example of how dynamic the medical publication landscape can be. Withdrawal of one article does not mean other similar articles are not valid though, or that a general concept is not valid. The research landscape can seem very dynamic and conflicted, even if there may often eventually emerge broad agreement on some truths. Could better tools help even subject matter experts track all these changes? So, whether you are an expert in a field or just an individual with a health issue, there is a challenge to make sense of this all for yourself at any point in time (even if the challenges may differ somewhat for expert and patient). It is also hard to draw conclusions from small numbers of studies in a mass of large numbers of publications on complex topics (something somewhat analogous to "weak signal detection" in the intelligence community). Yet, ultimately, each of us still personally needs to decide how much salt to eat each day (or broccoli or sugar or barley), so we can't avoid the issue (even if we can ignore the issue or any new information and just keep on eating as we have in the past).

Ideally, one might imagine authoritative sources on every aspect of health (including salt consumption) which supply the best health advice for every locality specific to every person. For example, imagine the archetypal old-fashioned-but-up-to-date grizzled "country doctor" who knows entire families in a community from birth for multiple generations in a personal way and provides the best specific health advice for the area and the individual. That might range perhaps from "Salt killed your grandpap!" to "Ain't too much to worry about salt since you exercise so much working outside in the Arizona sunshine." But such a health practitioner and community is mostly just a fantasy. There may be such health practitioners and stable communities out there, but they would seem at best few and far between these days in today's highly mobile society.

Compared to the ideal mentioned above, in practice a typical real-life health interaction for all too many people is more likely to be ten minutes spent with a new physician (perhaps due to insurance plan coverage changes) who recently moved to the area, has big worries about repaying US$200K in newly-minted student loans, and has limited experience with a specific health complaint and the individual's life history (including what is not said). In regards to an issue like advice on salt consumption, even if the physician knows that in theory someone who exercises outdoors a lot probably needs to take in more salt, is there going to be time to get around to discussing that level of detail about lifestyle with the patient or how it might relate to some health issue? Would there be time to explore and address a digestive complaint perhaps unknowingly from weak stomach acid from low salt levels? It may well be that many people eat too much salt, but perhaps this specific person perhaps eats too little for his or her situation?

In practice, there are a variety of sources of health information we encounter each with various conflicts of interest and with limitations in focus, experience, time, and continuity. A person with a health issue is confronted by all that complexity, even if they may choose to delegate the authority for all their health decisions to some chosen medical practitioner. Ultimately, we can delegate "authority", but not "responsibility"; in that sense a competent adult remains responsible for his or her health regardless of who has been asked for advice or who we let perform procedures on us.

====

There is the vaguest beginning of that in a GitHub project linked here and in some other projects called Twirlip (but they've been eclipsed by a need to do other things for income):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/health-decision-support-tools

Although, as in the example there using IBIS to explore choices for dental health issue, it is possible that the IBIS methodology may be good enough to get a lot of people fairly far. Likely we can do better than IBIS, but I can acknowledge it is hard to do better than IBIS for several reasons (including simplicity, learnability, speed, and collaborativeness). For more on IBIS, Dialog Mapping, and Wicked Problems, see the references I've collected here (among others on a larger topic):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...