Classification and diagnosis of the anxiety and depressive disorders and some implications for clinical practice and enquiry

145 patients diagnosed with a structured interview as 'depressive illness' or 'anxiety disorder' were submitted to multivariate analyses which yielded a bimodal distribution corresponding to the anxiety and depressive disorders, respectively. As anxiety and depressive profiles were negatively correlated to a significant extent, they were mutually exclusive with some overlap, rather than independent. In a further analysis with seven well validated rating scales 117 patients with anxiety disorder, agoraphobia and neurotic depression alone were not studied. Statistical analysis separated clinical profiles of anxiety and depressive disorders with some overlap. Complete separation was achieved with discriminant function analysis. Some individual anxiety and depression scales on their own achieved this separation. Clusters of childhood emotional and behavioural traits proved capable to some extent of predicting the disorder to be manifest in the adult stage in both sexes. But only in females was the form of illness into which patients developed as adults (anxiety or depression) correctly predicted (88%) from childhood traits to a highly significant degree. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.