Hostname: page-component-5cf477f64f-xc2pj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-05T23:12:19.815Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bimodality and the Nature of Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

B. S. Everitt
B. S. Everitt*
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Arguments concerning the nature of depressive disorders have involved as a central issue the question of the bimodality or otherwise of the distribution of some variable expressing variation in symptomatology. The implications of a particular type of frequency distribution along this dimension, whether uni- or bi-modal, have been misunderstood by a number of workers, and an attempt is made to clarify the situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 138 , Issue 4 , April 1981 , pp. 336 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1981 

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

Behboodian, J. (1970) On a mixture of normal distributions. Biometrika, 57, 215–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, D. R. (1966) Notes on the analysis of mixed frequency distributions. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 19, 39–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberger, I. (1964) Genesis of bimodal distributions. Technometrics, 6, 357–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Everitt, B. S. & Hand, D. J. (1981) Finite Mixture Distributions. London: Chapman and Hall.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleiss, J. L. (1972) Classification of the depressive disorders by numerical typology. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 9, 141–153.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garside, R. F. & Roth, M. (1978) Multivariate statistical methods and problems of classification in psychiatry. British Journal of Psychiatry, 133, 53–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendell, R. E. (1969) The continuum model of depressive illness. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 62, 335–339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendell, R. E. & Brockington, I. F. (1980) The identification of disease entities and the relationship between schizophrenic and affective psychoses. British Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 324–331.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kendell, R. E. & Gourlay, J. (1970) The clinical distinction between psychotic and neurotic depressions. British Journal of Psychiatry, 117, 257–260.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kiloh, L. G. & Garside, R. F. (1963) The independence of neurotic depression and endogenous depression. British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 451–463.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murphy, E. D. (1964) One cause? Many causes? The argument from the bimodal distribution. Journal of Chronic Disorders, 17, 301–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pilowsky, I. Levine, S. & Boulton, D. M. (1969) The classification of depression by numerical taxonomy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 937–945.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.