Atypical depression: a review of diagnosis and treatment.

The diagnosis of atypical depression has been used in a variety of ways in the psychiatric literature. The authors review the different uses of the term and then examine the syndrome's capacity to reliably predict course of illness, family prevalence, biological test date, and response to treatment. They conclude that as a diagnosis, atypical depression is misleading and does not describe a discrete or homogeneous group of patients. However, the literature on atypical depression has been extremely important in identifying patients for whom pharmacological intervention may be of great benefit and for whom it has been underutilized in the past.