Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T16:24:51.463Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Psychotic and Neurotic Depression: 2. Clinical Characteristics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Máire Ní Bhrolcháin ,
G. W. Brown  and
T. O. Harris
Máire Ní Bhrolcháin
Affiliation:
Centre for Population Studies, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London W.C.1
T. O. Harris
Affiliation:
Bedford College, Regent's Park, London N.W.1
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

A series of discriminant function analyses based only on clinical symptomatology suggests that psychotic and neurotic depressives do not differ globally but at a fairly specific level and that the principal, if not only, clinical difference between the groups is one of severity. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that there are few symptoms more common in the neurotic group. There is suggestive evidence that symptoms generally thought to characterize neurotic depression may conduce to referral to psychiatric services. The neurotic depressive syndrome as classically conceived may therefore be an artificial one, created by selective factors bringing patients with particular symptoms into hospital populations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 134 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 94 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. A. (1975) Quadratic logistic discrimination. Biometrika, 62, 149–54.Google Scholar
Brown, G. W., Sklair, F., Harris, T. O. & Birley, J. L. T. (1973) Life events and psychiatric disorders. Part I: some methodological issues. Psychological Medicine, 3, 74–87.Google Scholar
Brown, G. W., Ní Bhrolcháin, M. & Harris, T. O. (1975) Social class and psychiatric disturbance among women in an urban population. Sociology, 9, 225–54.Google Scholar
Brown, G. W., Ní Bhrolcháin, M. & Harris, T. O. (1977) Psychotic and neurotic depression: 3. Aetiological and background factors, (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Carney, M. W., Roth, M. & Garside, R. F. (1965) The diagnosis of depressive syndromes and the prediction of ECT response. British Journal of Psychiatry, 111, 659–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cormack, R. M. (1971) A review of classification. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (A), 134, 321–67.Google Scholar
Engel, G. L. (1967) A psychological setting of somatic disease: the ‘giving up-given up’ complex. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 60, 553–5.Google ScholarPubMed
Essen-Möller, E. (1973) Standard lists for three-fold classification of mental disorders. Acta Psychiatrica Scandanavica, 49, 198–212.Google Scholar
Fisher, R. A. (1940) The precision of discriminant functions. Annals of Eugenics, 10, 422–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foulds, G. A. (1965) Personality and Personal Illness. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Foulds, G. A. (1973) The relationship between the depressive illnesses. British Journal of Psychiatry, 122, 531–3.Google Scholar
Foulds, G. A. & Bedford, A. (1975) Hierarchy of classes of personal illness. Psychological Medicine, 5, 181–92.Google Scholar
Foulds, G. A. & Caine, T. M. (1959) Some symptoms and signs of depression in women. Journal of Mental Science, 105, 182–9.Google Scholar
Garside, R. F., Kay, D. W. K., Wilson, I. C., Deaton, I. D. & Roth, M. (1971) Depressive syndromes and the classification of patients. Psychological Medicine, 1, 333–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guilford, J. P. (1965) Fundamental Statistics in Psychology and Education. 4th edition. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Hope, K. (1968) Methods of Multivariate Analysis. London: University of London Press.Google Scholar
Hope, K. (1969) Review of ‘The Classification of Depressive Illnesses’ by Kendell, R. E. British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 731–4.Google Scholar
Kendell, R. E. (1968) The Classification of Depressive Illnesses. Maudsley Monograph No. 18. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kendell, R. E. (1970) The problem of classification. Recent Developments in Affective Disorders. Special Publication No. 2, 15–26.Google Scholar
Kendell, R. E. (1976) The classification of depression: a review of contemporary confusion. British Journal of Psychiatry, 129, 15–28.Google Scholar
Kiloh, L. G. & Garside, R. F. (1963) The independence of neurotic depression and endogenous depression. British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 451–63.Google Scholar
Lewis, A. J. (1938) States of depression: their clinical and aetiological differentiation. British Medical Journal, ii, 875–8.Google Scholar
Mapother, E. (1926) Manic-depressive psychoses. British Medical Journal, ii, 872–9.Google Scholar
Maxwell, A. E. (1971) Multivariate statistical methods and classification problems. British Journal of Psychiatry, 119, 121–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moran, P. A. P. (1966) The establishment of a psychiatric syndrome. British Journal of Psychiatry, 112, 1165–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ní Bhrolcháin, M. (1978) Psychotic and neurotic depression: 1. Some points of method. British Journal of Psychiatry, 134, 94–107.Google Scholar
Pilowsky, I., Levine, S. & Boulton, D. M. (1969) The classification of depression by numerical taxonomy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 937–45.Google Scholar
Wing, J. K. (1973) Social and familial factors in the causation and treatment of schizophrenia. In: Biochemistry and Mental Illness (edited by Iversen, L. L. and Rose, S.). London: The Biochemical Society.Google Scholar
Wing, J. K., Cooper, J. E. & Sartorius, N. (1974) The Measurement and Classification of Schizophrenic Symptoms. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.