All patients hospitalized at the Department of Psychiatry, Umea University, during the years 1960-1963 with the clinical diagnosis of neurotic-reactive depression were reevaluated and followed for 10 years. At the reevaluation of the records, it was found that the clinical diagnosis neurotic-reactive depression was used in a very imprecise way. Only 83 of the 146 patients with the clinical diagnosis of neurotic-reactive depression fulfilled our research criteria for neu­rotic-reactive depression (Table 2). When the 83 patients fulfilling our research criteria were followed over 10 years, the diagnosis was only changed in 2 (4%) of the patients (Table 3). Our results are in line with the findings of Rasmussen et al. (15); in their study only 2 of 23 patients with neurotic-reactive depression developed an affective psychosis during a 15-year follow-up period. However, the results are contradictory to the results obtained by Akiskal et al. (1). In their study 40% of the patients with neurotic-reactive depression developed a unipolar or bipolar affective disorder during a 3 to 4-year follow-up period. The discrepancy is probably owing to the differences in the diagnostic criteria used. If we had accepted the clinical diagnosis of neurotic-reactive depression and followed the whole group, our results would have been much more similar to the ones achieved by Akiskal et al. (1). However,
if our diagnostic criteria are followed strictly, we seem to be able to delineate a subgroup that at least is clearly distinct from unipolar and bipolar affective dis­orders.

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