The Course of Recurrent Depressive Illness in Selected Patients from a Defined Population

Abstract

All depressed patients from a population of 175,000 who were hospitalized in 1965-1966 at least twice, were followed up for 3 years to find out whether their course could be predicted. Out of 53 patients who did not receive lithium, 40 could be followed to the end of the period. Each of these 40 patients was studied from the 1st January 1965 to the 31st December 1969. 15 patients diagnosed as reactive depression had a poorer prognosis than the rest. The remaining 25 spent only half the time in the hospital during the follow-up (89 days per year during control period, and 40 days per year during observation period), and the result is statistically significant. The number of admissions of these 25 patients was reduced to a quarter. This result is as good as that attributed to lithium by uncontrolled studies, whose evidence must therefore be retested. Whether the results of the present study are due to the selection criteria or the administration of psychotropic drugs or both could not be answered.