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The Bearing of Treatment on the Classification of the Affective Disorders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Kurt Schapira
Affiliation:
Psychological Medicine Research Unit, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Extract

The relationship between anxiety state and depressive illness has been debated for many years. On clinical grounds, Mapother (1926) and Lewis (1966) expressed the view that the various forms of anxiety and depressive states merge imperceptibly into one another, while Garmany (1956, 1958) and Stenback (1963) considered that they were fundamentally different disorders. Gurney, Roth and Garside (1970) showed that the two conditions differ significantly in respect of a large number of biographical, personality and clinical indices. They also demonstrated that the disorders could be separated by means of a discriminant function analysis and that the distribution of the patients' scores was clearly bimodal. In a four year follow-up study of the same group of patients, Kerr, Gurney, Schapira and Roth (1970) showed that depressive illnesses carry a significantly better prognosis. Moreover, physiological evidence based on forearm blood-flow measurements has also given tentative support to the differentiation of the disorders (Kelly and Walter, 1969).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1970 

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