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Concerns about depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2020

HM van Praag
HM van Praag*
Affiliation:
Academic Psychiatric Centre, University of Limburg, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands

Summary

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Biological depression research can boast of a number of significant achievements over the past 35 years. Yet, in spite of those achievements, the field is in danger of desiccation. Five reasons are discussed herein: 1) short-comings of the DSM-based depression classification; 2) the ever increasing number of, generally poorly validated, diagnostic categories; 3) desubjectivation of psychiatric diagnosing; 4) the lack of a dimensional (better: functional) component in diagnosing depression; and 5) horizontalism, ie the absence of attempts to group symptoms “vertically” according to their diagnostic weight. The issues are in need of urgent scientific attention, lest biological depression research will stagnate and ultimately whither. We have indicated ways to approach the issues.

Keywords

depressionbiological research in depressionnosological and dimensional depression classificationprimary and secondary symptoms in depression
Type
Editorial paper
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 10 , Issue 6 , 1995 , pp. 269 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Elsevier, Paris 1995

Footnotes

*

Plenary Lecture read at the 7th Congress of the Association of European Psychiatrists, Copenhagen, 18–22 September 1994.

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