Depressive Syndromes and Scales in the AMDP‐system

The Association for Methodology and Documentation in Psychiatry was founded in 1965 by a group of psychiatrists from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It developed a uniform and comprehensive system for the documentation of psychopathological, somatic, and anamnestic findings, the AMP‐System. In 1979 a revised system was introduced, the AMDP‐System. In the AMP‐System there are 5 suggestions as to syndrome scale construction based on analyses of data of psychiatric clinics in Munich (2 samples), in Zurich (1 sample), and in Berlin (2 samples). The corresponding syndromes of the different solutions are highly intercorrelated. In the AMDP‐System final syndrome scales were constructed on the basis of combined samples of the psychiatric clinics of the universities in Munich and in Berlin. The AMDP syndrome scales show a high similarity with the AMP syndrome scales, whereby a good comparability is ensured between older studies using the AMP‐ and present studies using the AMDP‐System. All syndrome scale solutions include, besides 6 or 7 other syndromes, like a paranoid‐hallucinatory and a manic syndrome, two syndromes especially pertinent to the assessment of depressive states: the depressive and the apathy syndromes. The syndromes are described and it is shown how they and other syndromes discriminate different depressive diseases (defined by ICD‐diagnoses). There is a considerable overlap in psychology between the diagnostic groups — in spite of a remarkable good discrimination of these groups by psychopathological syndromes — therefore the patients were classified de novo by cluster analysis in more homogenous groups regarding psychopathology. The results are illustrated by some “depressive” clusters in comparison to depressive diagnostic groups.