BIOLOGICAL SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION

Frequency of occurrence of various biological symptoms in relation to intensity of depression and neuroticism was studied in 37 depressed patients. The best indicators of depression severity and neuroticism were, respectively, early waking and excessive dreaming, when the symptoms were studied individually. A group of biological symptoms predicting the severity of depression was found via stepwise multiple regression analysis of variance. No such grouping was found for neuroticism. However, only neuroticism was found to be a useful predictor of the biological symptoms when taken as a whole.