Eighty-nine consecutive admissions with primary depressive illness were prospectively ascertained and diagnosed in 1965-66 by R. E. Kendell, who also allocated each a position on a neurotic-psychotic continuum on the basis of previous discriminant function analysis. In 1983-84, 94% of the survivors were personally interviewed by a psychiatrist blind to index admission data. Operational outcome criteria were employed and longitudinal data were established for 98% of the series. Mortality risk was doubled overall, and increased sevenfold for women under 40 years at index admission. Less than one-fifth of the survivors had remained well, and over one-third of the series suffered unnatural death or severe chronic distress and handicap. Patients whose index episode marked their first psychiatric contact had a 50% chance of readmission within their lifetime, but those with previous admissions had a 50% chance of readmission within three years. Readmissions occurred even after 12 years of being symptom-free, and conversely patients recovered after as long as 15 years of illness. There was a high incidence of other disorders (schizoaffective disorder, alcoholism, schizophrenia), and only four patients showed pure recurrent unipolar histories. Patients at the psychotic end of the continuum were more likely to be readmitted and to have very poor outcomes.

In 1965/66, a consecutive series of 89 in-patients with depression were interviewed, given two personality tests (the EPI and LOI), and were accorded a score on a neurotic-psychotic continuum (DI). Eighteen years later, the series was followed up and the predictive power of the original data was determined. High neuroticism scores on the EPI on recovery and particularly when ill but referring to the pre-morbid state were associated with poor overall outcome and chronicity. High obsessional interference scores on the LOI on recovery were also associated with poor long-term outcome, impaired social adjustment, more time spent in hospital, and with the subsequent development of schizophrenic or schizoaffective episodes. High psychotic scores on the DI were also associated with poor long-term outcome, a greater length of time spent in hospital, and with bipolar affective disorder, and this effect was independent of the personality measures.

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Collecting data online via crowdsourcing platforms has proven to be a very efficient way to recruit individuals from a large diverse sample. While many fields in psychology have embraced online studies, the field of motor learning has lagged behind. We suspect this is because of an implicit assumption that the loss of experimental control with online data collection will be problematic for kinematic data. As a first foray to bring motor learning online, we developed a web-based platform to collect kinematic data, serving as a template for researchers to create their own online sensorimotor control and learning experiments. As a proof-of-concept, we present three visuomotor rotation experiments conducted with this platform, asking if fundamental motor learning phenomena discovered in the lab could be reproduced online. In all experiments, there was a close correspondence between the results obtained online with those previously reported from research conducted in the laboratory. As such, our web-based motor learning platform can serve as a powerful tool to exploit the benefits of crowdsourcing approaches and extend research on motor learning beyond the confines of the traditional laboratory.

SYNOPSISThe hypothesis that recurrent or chronic depressive illness produces a long-term change in neuroticism was examined in a sample (N = 34) from a consecutive series of 89 depressed patients admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in 1965/6. The Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) was administered at the time of the index illness both when the patients were depressed and on recovery, and then again at follow-up 18 years later. The change in the neuroticism (N) score over the 18-year-period was compared in good and poor outcome groups defined variously by a global rating of outcome, frequency of episodes, extent of subsequent hospitalization and the presence or absence of subsequent chronicity. The mean N score for the sample as a whole did not change significantly over the 18 years, and no differential change in the N score was observed between any of the good and poor outcome groups. Thus, the hypothesis was not supported.