THE STRUCTURE OF COMMON PSYCHIATRIC-SYMPTOMS - HOW MANY DIMENSIONS OFNEUROSIS

In order to replicate and elaborate the two-dimensional model of depre ssion and anxiety underlying the structure of common psychiatric sympt oms proposed by Goldberg et al. (1987), we carried out latent trait an alyses on PSE symptom data of the original Manchester study and two re cent Dutch studies. We used the same analytical strategy as Goldberg e t al. to facilitate comparison with the earlier work. It was found tha t a more comprehensive set of common psychiatric symptoms caused an ex tra, third dimension to emerge, so that the earlier anxiety dimension became split between a specific anxiety axis characterized by situatio nal and phobic anxiety and avoidance, and a non-specific anxiety axis characterized by free-floating anxiety, various symptoms relating to t ension, irritability and restlessness. It is argued that three dimensi ons are sufficient to account for the covariance between common psychi atric symptoms. A fairly consistent correlation between the non-specif ic anxiety and the depression dimension was found across sites, as wel l as independence of the specific anxiety dimension from the other two dimensions. Furthermore, the depression dimension was robust with sim ilar symptom profiles across samples, but there appeared to be local d ifferences in the structure of anxiety symptoms.