Psychological deficits in depressed medical patients

A frequent clinical problem observed in the medical setting is depression secondary to the impact of physical illness and hospitalization. Typically, approaches developed on physically healthy samples are applied to these patients without many specific data on this particular subtype of depression. Both cognitive abilities and behavioral functions were assessed in a sample of medically ill depressed patients, who were compared to medically ill nondepressed patients and community-dwelling healthy controls. Illness and attendant hospitalization were associated with deficits in psychomotor speed, recognition memory, and abstract abilities, but depression was not associated with further disruptions. On behavioral indices, depression, but not hospitalization and illness, was associated with deficits in the interpersonal realm of functioning. These findings suggest that deficits on performance of psychological tasks in depressed ill patients can be explained by illness and hospitalization. The behavioral data further characterize the depressive as having difficulty in social relations, which suggests that interventions like social skills training and mobilization of social networks may be an effective addition in the treatment of the depressed medical patient.