PSYCHIATRIC CONSEQUENCES OF STRESS AFTER A VEHICLE ACCIDENT

Background: Vehicle accidents are a common cause of disease and death among people over 30 years of age. Essentially, reaction to stress due to the vehicle accident does not differ from the reaction to other stress factors. There are still no uniform viewpoints about the kind of sequels and their percentage representation after vehicle accidents. Subjects and methods: The research was provided as a prospective study, included 150 subjects who had vehicle accident minimum 2 years prior to the examination. A questionnaire adjusted to the needs of the research and a battery of psychological tests was used. Results: Affective disorders occurred in 35.33% of subjects, 65% of persons suffer from travel anxiety, 9% of the total number of examinees doesn’t drive any more, 65% have somatisational dysfunctions of the vegetative nervous system, while the posttraumatic stress disorder is present in 36% of subjects. Conclusion: In 87.4% of persons psychiatric consequences last over two years. Long term consequences in 60% of subjects occur as a combination of multiple psychiatric disorders, so the posttraumatic stress disorder and affective disorders never occur one at a time

Structure of the clinical and geriatric depression: Similarities and differences

Studies demonstrating the uniqueness of depression in old age are numerous, but conclusions on the fact if the problems of the elderly people cause depression or if they are a part of depression are not unique. The aim of this paper is to compare the structure of depression of old people without the history of mental illness and middle-aged people treated for depression. The sample consists of 82 healthy inmates of different Homes for the Aged and 78 patients diagnosed with some sort of affective disorder. A depression has been assessed with the shorten version of the MMPI D-scale. The structure of the geriatric and clinical depression has been compared with the method of maximum likelihood, over the matrix of co-variances of answers on the items on the depression scale. The results point out to the statistically significant difference in the structure of depression of the old and clinically depressed individuals. However, half of the items of the D-scale have significant loadings on the factor of depression in both groups. The essence of the depression in both samples is made of cognitive subject matters, depressive affect, decline of motivation and a negative estimate of one's basic abilities. Symptoms concerning low self-esteem, experiencing cognitive deficit, energy and impaired physical health have been significant in describing the clinical depression, while a feeling of reduced positive stimulation and the affective liability is typical for the depression of geriatric sample. The conclusion is that, despite the differences, there is a common core of symptoms that makes the essence of depression, apart from the samples