Introduction/Objectives:

A debate persists on whether major depression following stroke is in any way different from the primary (“purely psychiatric”) depression.

Several studies suggest that dysfunctional cognitive schemas ofself and the world (with a deeper dependence of self-worth on the evaluation of others and on the estimated success of own performance) characterize primary depression thinking.

Participants, Materials/Methods:

In order to figure out if this is the case with the poststroke depression too, we administered the Sentence Completion Task (as conceived by Teasdale et al., 1995) alongside the classical Self-Esteem Scale (of Rosenberg, 1963, 1965) and common scales for depression (including Beck's and Hamilton's) to poststroke (n= 31) and primary (n= 32) unipolar depressives (based on DSM-IV criteria) and to control nondepressive subjects with (n= 31) or without (n= 33) stroke (all groups being equivalent in respect to the main relevant psycho-demographic variables).

Results:

The analyses of the data using common statistical procedures showed a large similarity of dysfunctional answers between the two groups of depressed patients (as opposed to the non-depressed group), suggesting that the same type of distorted cognitive schemas is operating in each form of depression. Moreover, at follow-up, the success of pharmacological treatment (proved by the decrease of the levels of depression on specific scales) seems to be associated in both clinical groups with a return to more functional (realistic) cognitive models of self and the world.

Conclusions:

These results plead for the similarity of poststroke and primary unipolar depression.