Recurrent depression could be considered as a stumbling block for the individuals during their active period of life. Beside the global functionality, recurrent depression could affect negatively academic skills of depressed subjects that will result in considerable higher indirect costs of the disorder. Our main objective was to reveal the clinical and non clinical factors correlated with academic impairment in subjects with recurrent depression.

We performed a longitudinal retrospective study on 248 patients admitted in our Clinic for Recurrent depressive disorder during 2001 - 2005. Two control samples were done, one with Bipolar affective disorder (N=44) and other with Persistent delusional disorder (N=59).

From 90 depressed subjects who were employed at the onset of psychiatric disorder, 56 (62.2%) became retired and another 6 (6.6%) became unemployed. Despite the treatability of recurrent depression the negative outcome on academic skills was similar to that occurring in both control groups that traditionally are considered as being more disabling. The clinical factors that concurred to the worsening of academic status were the more advancing age at the onset and actual moment of recurrent depression (p=0.006 and p=0.012 respectively), along with longer total duration of recurrent depression (p< 0.001), the absolute total number of depressive episodes and psychiatric hospitalizations (p=0.001).

Recurrent depression has a significant negative outcome on academic skills. The disabling character of recurrent depression could be caused by its high chronicity along with high recurrent pattern of clinical evolution.