Am J Psychiatry 1982; 139:1022-1027
Copyright © 1982 by American Psychiatric Association
Definitions of depression: concordance and prediction of outcome
IF Brockington, JE Helzer, VF Hillier and AF Francis
Using patient samples in London hospitals, the authors compared three
methods of diagnosing and subdividing depressive illness in terms of their
ability to predict outcome. The Catego class D+ selected patients who
continued to suffer from episodes of psychotic depression. The Research
Diagnostic Criteria selected patients with schizoaffective depressions
whose outcome a completely different from that of major depressive
disorder. DSM-III had advantages over the other systems, since it divides
depression into three subtypes that differ from each other and from
schizophrenia. Patients with a DSM-III diagnosis of mood- incongruent
psychotic depression had persistent schizophrenic psychopathology, but
their outcome differed from that of both schizophrenic and manic-depressive
patients.
