Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:52:05.907Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Taxonomy of Depressive Phenomena and its Relationships to the Reactive-Endogenous Dichotomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

J. J. Kear-Colwell
J. J. Kear-Colwell*
Affiliation:
Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, G51 4TF
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This study has arisen out of the work of the Newcastle group (Kiloh and Garside, 1963; Kay et al., 1969) and that of the London group (Kendell, 1968) on the forms of depressive illness. In the present investigation, unlike those mentioned, a subjective approach was employed; that is, what the patients actually reported about themselves rather than a psychiatric appraisal of the patient was used as the data. A similar approach was employed by Pilowsky, Levine and Boulton (1969) in their taxonomic study of depression. The object of this paper is firstly, to investigate the systematic and the taxonomy of depressive phenomena; secondly to look at this taxonomy in depressive illness and non-depressive illness patients; and thirdly to investigate the psychiatrist's notion of the endogenous-reactive dichotomy within this taxonomy. Essentially the question is whether there is a continuum of depression, at one pole being reactive depression and at the other pole endogenous depression or whether these two classical diagnoses represent separate empirical entities. The former view is taken by the London workers and the latter by the Newcastle workers. In a recent review article, Eysenck (1970) favoured the binary or separate entity model, although he suggests that both views of depressive illness are over simplistic in their formulations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 121 , Issue 565 , December 1972 , pp. 665 - 671
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Byrne, D. (1961). ‘The Repression-Sensitisation Scale: rationale, reliability and validity.’ Journal of Personality, 29, 334–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byrne, D. (1964). ‘Repression-Sensitisation as a dimension of personality’, in Progress in Experimental Personality Research, vol. 1. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Cattell, R. B. (1966). ‘The Scree Test for the number of factors.’ Multivariate Behavioural Research, 1, 245–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Everitt, B. S., Gourlay, A. J., and Kendell, R. E. (1971). ‘An attempt at validation of traditional psychiatric syndromes by cluster analysis.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 119, 399–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eysenck, H. J. (1970). ‘The classification of depressive illness.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 117, 241–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foulds, G. A. (1962). ‘A qualification of diagnostic differentiae.’ Journal of Mental Science, 108, 389–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foulds, G. A. and Hope, K. (1968). Manual for the Symptom-Sign Inventory. London: University of London Press.Google Scholar
Guttman, L. (1954). ‘Some necessary conditions for common factor analysis.’ Psychometrika, 19, 149–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jennrich, R. I. and Sampson, P. E. (1966). ‘Rotation for simple loadings.’ Psychometrika, 31, 313–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kay, D. W., Garside, R. F., Beamish, P., and Roy, J. R. (1969). ‘Endogenous and neurotic syndromes of depression: a factor analytic study of 104 cases.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 377–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendell, R. E. (1968). The Classification of Depressive Illness. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kiloh, L. G., and Garside, R. F. (1963). ‘The independence of neurotic depression and endogenous depression.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 451–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nunnally, J. C. (1967). Psychometric Theory. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Paykel, E. S. (1971). ‘Classification of depressed patients: a cluster analysis derived grouping.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 118, 275–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pilowsky, I., Levine, S., and Boulton, D. M. (1969). ‘The classification of depression by numerical taxonomy.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 937–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slater, E., and Roth, M. (1970). Clinical Psychiatry, 3rd ed. London: Baillière, Tindall Gand Cassell.Google Scholar
Turland, D. N., and Steinhard, M. (1969). ‘The efficiency of the Memory-for-Designs Test.’ British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 44–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.