Critical life events and everyday stress in patients with depression or inremission

Stress seems to be meaningful in the context of depression especially in te rms of critical life events. Several studies have outlined the connection b etween this type of stress and depression. However, few studies have been c onducted in order to explore the significance of stress in a broader sense, mainly by including daily hassles. In our study three aspects of stress we re addressed: (a) critical life events in the last year, (b) dairy hassles and (c) the current stress level in several life domains such as marriage, profession, leisure time, child rearing, psychological and physical well-be ing, social contacts etc. 21 subjects with low depression scores (BDI 12-19), 18 depressed persons wi th BDI-scores above 20 and 21 remitted patients (BDI-score below 11), all s ubjects suffering from current or former major depression, administered que stionnaires assessing their stress appraisal in regard to the above mention ed stressors. The results reveal that the depressed patients experienced more stress in a ll different areas and reported especially higher frequencies of critical l ife events concerning health problems and social conflicts than remitted or controls. Within daily hassles the depressed scared significantly higher t han controls and it was evident that more life domains were contaminated by strains in this group. Our findings are discussed in regard to their clini cal implications for therapy.