The British Journal of Psychiatry (1970) 117: 635-643. doi: 10.1192/bjp.117.541.635
© 1970 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
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The Reporting of Recent Stress in the Lives of Psychiatric Patients

A Study of 80 Hospitalized Patients and 103 Informants Reporting the Presence or Absence of Specified Types of Stress

RICHARD W. HUDGENS M.D.1, ELI ROBINS M.D.2, and W. BRADFORD DELONG M.D.3

1 Associate Professor of Psychiatry
2 Wallace Renard Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
3 Neurosurgeon, San Francisco, California

Eighty recently hospitalized psychiatric patients and 103 relatives (at least one adult informant for each patient) were interviewed with respect to the presence or absence of eleven types of stress in the previous year. There was a low rate of agreement between patients and informants as to whether a type of stress had occurred, and whether a specific event had occurred. Patients and informants differed even more greatly in estimating the effects of stressful events on psychiatric illness and vice versa. The study also demonstrated that the more events that were reported for a given patient and the more events that were reported within a given category of stress, the greater was the disagreement between informants and patients as to whether the events had occurred.

We conclude that retrospective studies which purport to demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between stressful events and established non-organic psychiatric illness may be of dubious validity.

Submitted on July 21, 1969




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