Canter (1951) reported a descriptive study of MMPI profiles of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Although recognizing the limitations of the approach, he calculated the average MMPI profile for this group of 33 World War II veteran patients and inferred from the mean profile for the group that the typical personality configuration in MS included a reaction to the stress of the illness with depression and its accessory symptoms. When depression is a major variable under study, the averaging of MMPI profiles can obscure important profile differences especially if subsamples are combined, one of which has very high D scores and the other of which has very low D scores. This is a particularly important consideration in the study of an illness such as MS in which both reactions of high depression and low depression because of denial and repression have been observed. If discrete profile types were to be produced reflecting each of these reaction types, such an important difference would be cancelled out and masked by averaging. The aim of the present study was to attempt to check Canter's MMPI findings and to answer the following questions: (a) Can a typical response to MS in the direction of depression be inferred from the MMPI? (b) Among patients with neurological lesions, are MMPI profiles indicative of depression more common in MS than in other conditions? To investigate the latter question, a control group of neurological patients was selected who had suffered brain injury from external causes. A second purpose of this paper is to report on significant relationships between MMPI profile characteristics and illness and demographic variables which became apparent when profiles were studied as depressed and non-depressed types rather than as average group profiles.
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