Anxiety State or Masked Depression?

In 1959, West and Dally reported the effects of iproniazid in depressive syndromes, drawing attention to the greater therapeutic effectiveness of this drug in ‘atypical’ or ‘hysterical’ depressive states than in endogenous depression. Later, Sargant and Dally (1962) found a group of patients with good previous personalities, showing obvious features of depression, whose anxiety symptoms responded to phenelzine alone, but in view of the response of other patients with anxiety they questioned whether monoamine oxidase inhibitors were really antidepressant, or whether they were essentially drugs acting against anxiety. These findings prompted this study, intended to compare other parts of the clinical pictures of anxiety states responsive to monoamine oxidase inhibitors with those of depressive illnesses.