Personality pathology in recurrent depression: nature, prevalence, and relationship to treatment response

Personality assessments of 119 treatment-responsive patients with recurrent unipolar depression revealed that nearly half of the patients (48%) showed some personality disturbance. The most common personality features were avoidant (30.4%), compulsive (18.6%), and dependent (15.7%). Factor analyses of personality data in this homogeneous population yielded results that were consistent with previous factor analytic studies of personality features and clinical descriptions of depressed patients. Most notably, a discriminant function analysis using personality variables alone was able to distinguish (with 65% accuracy) between patients who responded normally to treatment and those who responded more slowly.