NIMH Clinical Research Branch Collaborative Program on the Psychobiology of Depression

Two-Year Prospective Naturalistic Study of Remission From Major Depressive Disorder as a Function of Personality Disorder Comorbidity.

“…Recently, MDD has become viewed as a chronic and complex problem rather than acute but transient (Mueller et al, 1999). Several longitudinal prospective studies have contributed much to our evolving understanding of the nature of MDD, including the epidemiological Zurich, Switzerland study (Angst, 1986) and clinical efforts such as the National Institute of Mental Health-Collaborative Depression Study (NIMH-CDS; Katz, Secunda, Hirschfeld, & Koslow, 1979). These studies have revealed that MDD is a chronic problem characterized by complex patterns of remission, recovery, and relapse (Frank et al, 1991).…”

Psychopharmacology and the Etiology of Psychopathologic States: Are We Looking in the Right Way?

“…The major points in this paper can be illustrated in somewhat more detail by comparing certain results from an earlier study of the psychobiology of depres sion (Maas et al 1980;Katz et al 1979) with fIndings generated by other investigators who reasoned in this componential manner. In the earlier study, the struc ture of the disorder was reexamined in severely de pressed hospitalized patients through the use of a range of behavioral, aff ective, and psychological performance measures.…”

“…Examination in the previous study (Maas et al 1980;Katz et al 1979) of the average componential prohle for a severely depressed sample of 104 patients indicated that the level of anxiety in those patients was almost as high as the level of depressed mood and that hostil ity was signiftcantly higher than in healthy controls (Katz et al 1984).…”

Major depressive disorder: longitudinal symptomatic structure, relapse and recovery

“…In a collaborative series of analyses conducted at UCSD the relationship between MDD and SD was examined, using the unique database of the NIMH Collaborative Depression Study (CDS) (12,13). The CDS is an ongoing prospective, naturalistic, long-term study of a large cohort (N5431) of MDD patients, followed systematically for up to 20 years.…”

“…Finally, it is noteworthy that sleep neurophysiological alteration, particularly decreased REM latency, in all subthreshold affective conditions are basically indistinguishable from those in major depression (3,16). The scienti®c con¯uence of the foregoing research heralds a new paradigm for understanding MDD as a dimensional illness, in which individual patients experience depressive symptoms ranging from a few subthreshold symptoms to major levels of severity in a typically¯uctuating lifelong course (12).…”