The Social Functioning of Depressed Patients: A Longitudinal Assessment

The present study was designed to examine the social functioning of depressed patients. Depressed and nondepressed psychiatric outpatients and nondepressed nonpsychiatric community control subjects completed measures of social functioning at two points in time: the first while the depressed patients met criteria for a diagnosis of major affective disorder, and the second 7 to 10 months later. The results of this study indicated that depressed patients reported more impaired social functioning than did either the nondepressed patients or the community controls. This pattern of results suggests that social dysfunction is specific to depression, rather than characteristic of general psychiatric disorder. Furthermore, despite a significant reduction in depressive symptomatology in the second session, the social functioning of the depressed patients did not improve over the course of the follow-up period. The possible role of social dysfunction as a risk factor for depression is discussed, and directions for future research are offered.