Life Events and Depressive Syndromes: Results of a Prospective Panel Study over 4 Years

Abstract

The assumption that distressing life events help engender psychiatric disorders already existed in etiological approaches of the nineteenth century (Griesinger 1845), while systematic research was taken up after World War II. The belief behind this “life event research” is that the assessment of life events elicits objective and quantifiable social occurrences in an individual’s life. The original model assumed that distress caused by any life event — independent of its type — would be pathogenic. This assumption was later modified and differentiated. Some authors tried to distinguish between “exits and entrances” (Paykel et al. 1969), between threats and losses (Brown et al. 1977), between desired and undesired events (Myers et al. 1974), etc. In spite of these efforts, however, no generally accepted theoretical conceptualization has yet been found. There are, for instance, no clear ideas about specific mechanisms inducing specific disorders under specific circumstances (Mechanic 1974).