Why I Created EarlyDetect
After 30 years of psychiatry, Dr. Chokka created EarlyDetect to catch what standard screening misses—before years are lost to the wrong diagnosis or no diagnosis at all.
By the time patients reach my office, they've usually been struggling for years.
Not weeks. Not months. Years.
They tell me about the job they lost because they couldn't focus. The marriage that fell apart because their moods were unpredictable. The decades of feeling like something was wrong—but every doctor said they were "just stressed" or "just depressed."
And when I finally diagnose them—often with something that was there all along, hiding in plain sight—the question is always the same:
"Why didn't anyone catch this sooner?"
That question haunted me.
Here's what I saw happening:
Family doctors—good, caring doctors—had 15 minutes and two tools: a depression questionnaire and an anxiety questionnaire.
So that's what they screened for. Depression and anxiety.
But mental health isn't that simple.
ADHD looks like depression when you're burned out from compensating for years. Bipolar disorder gets missed because patients only seek help when they're down, not when they're up. In our study, 63.3% of patients diagnosed with ADHD had at least one of the other assessed mental health conditions.
Liu, Cao & Chokka (2023) — a tertiary-care study, not a general population estimate.
The tools weren't wrong. They were just incomplete.
They asked about symptoms. They didn't ask about the whole person.
I spent 30 years doing something different in my practice.
I didn't just count symptoms. I looked at functioning—how is this affecting your work, your relationships, your daily life? I looked at history—when did this start, what was happening then? I looked at context—what else is going on that might explain this?
And I asked about the things other clinicians sometimes skip: purpose, connection, faith, what holds you together when everything falls apart.
This approach takes time. Time that most clinicians don't have.
So I asked myself: What if we could capture this in a tool? What if we could give every clinician—and every individual—access to a whole-person view?
That's why I built EarlyDetect.
EarlyDetect isn't just another checklist.
It integrates symptoms, functioning, and life context—the same elements I use in my clinical practice. It sees the whole person, not just a score.
We studied it with 955 patients at a tertiary mental health centre. Clinical interviews were conducted by a psychiatrist who did not see the tool's results. The studies used internal cross-validation; further independent validation is needed.
EarlyDetect brings symptoms, functioning, and history together to support clinical assessment. It is a screening tool, not a diagnosis.
Pilot results with internal cross-validation, not a guarantee of performance in every setting. Screening does not replace clinical diagnosis.
My goal isn't just better diagnosis. It's earlier diagnosis.
Nearly two-thirds of mental disorders first emerge before age 25, according to a large-scale meta-analysis. Delays in recognition and treatment can leave people struggling through important years of their lives.
Solmi et al., Molecular Psychiatry (2022) — 62.5% before age 25 across 192 epidemiological studies.
What if we could catch it early? Before the damage compounds?
That's the future I'm working toward. Not just treating mental health conditions, but preventing the years of unnecessary suffering that come from being missed.
"The conditions that change lives often hide in plain sight. I built EarlyDetect because I was tired of watching people lose years to something we could have caught sooner."
— Dr. Pratap Chokka
EarlyDetect is available for clinicians and organizations. Visit the EarlyDetect site to learn more about the science, see how it works, and explore how it might fit your practice or workplace.
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