Anxiety disorders and major depression, together or apart.

This paper will discuss the relationship between anxiety and depression. We will begin with a brief historical perspective. We will then move into the twentieth century, with a focus on the 1950s, at which time the introduction of pharmacological treatment options revolutionized the field of psychiatry. The use of psychiatric medications and the observation of treatment response provided an additional means of understanding the relationship between anxiety and depression. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, it became apparent that various medications possessed wider therapeutic profiles than were previously recognized. For example, many medications were found to be efficacious in both anxiety and depressive disorders. These expanded therapeutic profiles provided additional clues to fuel our thinking about the relationship between anxiety and depression. The two major objectives of this paper are, first, to describe and formalize a process of pharmacological dissection and, second, to consider how this process might contribute to our search for a better understanding of the relationship between anxiety and depression. Copyright 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.