الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract There is little disagreement ,that major depression is heterogeneous and that identification of homogenous sUbgroups is critical step in psychiatric research. The Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) were developed with putative sUbcategories of major depression that are non¬mutually exclusive. Therefore, it is entirely possible to meet criteria for diagnosis of endogenous major depression and for situational major depression simultaneously. Situational major depression is defined in the RDC as applying to those subjects in whom the depressive illness has developed after event or in a situation that seemed likely to have contributed to the appearance of the episode at that time. In this study, the validity of that concept is examined. Twenty-one patients with situational major depression diagnosed by the RDC were compared with nineteen patients with non-situational major depression. Both groups had undergone demographic, psychosocial, clinical and psychometric evaluations. The results of such evaluations were be as follows: (a) On the demographic variables, no difference was found between the two groups. |