Dr Alan J Carson, University of Edinburgh, discusses the realisation that depression after stroke was not simply a reaction to disability

Appraising the impact of Folstein et al's1 1977 report on ‘Mood disorder as a specific complication of stroke’ is a challenging task for someone who did not enter medical school until the mid-1980s. Stroke changed in the 1970s, and the view in retrospect appears unrecognisable. This was a dramatic change, from an intellectual backwater too dull for neurologists to even bother seeing, to become a hot topic: a disease to be …