Imipramine (Tofranil) in Depressive States a Controlled Trial with In-Patients

A large number of papers has been published in the last two or three years on the use of imipramine in depressive states. Much of this literature has been reviewed by Ball and Kiloh (1959) whose investigations on out-patients represents one of the remarkably few controlled trials that have so far appeared. We feel, therefore, that there is room for a report on another controlled study, this time with in-patients, in which the term “controlled” not only involved the usual “blind” procedures of administering tablets, but also included some of those elementary safeguards of reliability and validity of assessments without which uncertainty must remain concerning the meaning of any findings. Foulds (1958), for example, has presented evidence that uncontrolled investigations have a greater tendency to yield results supporting the hypotheses of investigations than experimentally fully controlled trials. In view of the claims that had been made for the efficacy of imipramine in a number of uncontrolled studies, we were primarily concerned to discover whether or not there existed valid scientific evidence of its value and, if so, in what kinds of depressive illness it appeared to be of most benefit.