Psychiatric co-morbidity in alcohol dependent individuals has been an issue of growing interest for researchers, what is in part justified by the influence of the dependence on the psychiatric morbidity's diagnosis, treatment and prognosis, and vice versa.

After a brief exposition about co-morbidity's concepts, the authors present the results of a retrospective study, based on the collection of data from clinical records of 106 inpatients, who all had an F10 (CID 10) diagnosis at discharge (Mental and Behaviour Disturbances due to the consumption of alcohol). The others psychiatric diagnoses were taken into account, as well as socio-demographic features and other relevant clinical variables.

Patients were mostly admitted from ambulatory clinic for detoxication purpose (n = 55).

“Patient's profile” was obtained and consisted on the higher percentage of: male (75.5%), mean age of 42,5 years old, married (62.7%), in active labor (49%), with low levels of education (n=51.3%) and socioeconomics (n = 74%).

At the time of discharge 65 patients received a double diagnosis, with 32 having Affective Disorders (depressive, except for one bipolar disorder) and 14 were diagnosed with Personality Disturbances.

Some of the hypotheses justifying such a high percentage of Affective Disorders remount to the possibility of patients not having a “sufficient abstinence” time and therefore depression can be over diagnosed. By other hand, is it that Anxiety Disorders (n=1) were mistaken for Affective Disorders?

There are other major points for discussion and authors correlate their results with the ones described in the most actual literature.