Measuring melancholia: the utility of a prototypic symptom approach

Abstract

In differentiating a melancholic subtype or syndrome, prototypic symptoms should be considered as a potential alternative to severity-based ratings.

Gender differences in depression severity and symptoms across depressive sub-types

“…Patients additionally completed the Mood Assessment Programme or MAP (Parker et al, 2008), a computerised tool assessing a range of features including socio-demographic, mood disorder and treatment history details. The MAP also contains a number of validated self-report measures of depressive symptomatology, including the Depression in the Medically Ill-10 measure (DMI-10; Parker et al, 2002), the Severity of Depressive Symptoms measure (SDS; Parker et al, 2009; and the Sydney Melancholia Prototype Index SMPI (Parker et al, 2012(Parker et al, , 2013b. All measures are detailed shortly.…”

“…The self-report Severity of Depressive Symptoms (SDS) measure (Parker et al, 2009 comprises 32 clinical symptoms rated on a 0-3 scale, and again captures symptoms historically weighted to both melancholic and non-melancholic depression. Properties of the measure have been reported previously (Parker et al, 2009;.…”

Depression as a culture-bound syndrome: implications for primary care

“…3 Consensus around the precise content of the diagnostic category is intrinsically unstable, as demonstrated by the move in DSM-V to allow grief symptoms to be considered as evidence of depressive disorder after only 2 weeks. There is disagreement among nosologists as to whether the category is too large, confusing normal experiences with illness and encompassing mutually exclusive subsets of depressive disorders; 4 or else too small, ignoring substantial symptomatic overlap with anxiety, pain syndromes, and medically unexplained symptoms. 5 In this issue, Warmenhoven and colleagues 6 suggest that the likelihood of making a diagnosis of depressive disorder in primary care is influenced by the patient's context including their age, the presence of chronic physical conditions, and perceived need for support.…”

Bias and discriminability during emotional signal detection in melancholic depression

“…cognitive slowing in melancholia) and signal detection performance. Previous research [35] has shown the prototypic diagnostic approach used in the current study (involving symptom and non-symptom data) to be more strongly differentiating of melancholic and non-melancholic depression than use of the DSM-derived [31] melancholic specifier criteria which consider symptoms only.…”