The term agitated depression is widely, but not definitively, used. Its scope varies from interchangeability with involutional melancholia to application to youthful depressions with psychomotor unrest. An approach to the validity of the syndrome is a study of the prepsychotic personality of a group of patients falling within this category. If a uniform personality type is found, distinctive from the average, an attempt can be made to correlate or to contrast it with described prepsychotic personality types, in order thereby to establish more accurately the position which this group merits in any diagnostic classification.
Kraepelin first described agitated depression as one of six types of mixed states of the manic-depressive psychoses. The continued use of the term is an index to its clinical usefulness. Henderson and Gillespie1 viewed it as the only entity in the group, considering the other types as transitional episodes between the manic and the depressive