Utility of Bender-Gestalt Test-II for Differential Diagnosis of Major Depressive patients, Brain damaged and Normal Subjects

The current study was performed with the aim of investigating the diagnostic utility of Bender-Gestalt Test-II (BDT-II) in two groups of patients with major depression and brain-damage, and to compare them with normal individuals. This was a causal-comparative study. Major depressive patients (n=30), brain-damaged patients (n=30) and normal subjects (n=30) were compared using BDT-II in copying, recall, motor, and perceptual phases. Data was analyzed via one-way variance and Kruskal-Wallis test approaches. The patients with depression and brain-damaged patients were not significantly different in none of the phases, however, the normal individuals had significantly better performances in all the three phases. The results indicated that BGT-II could differentiate the patients groups from normal subjects however its differential diagnostic power between the patient groups was weak. In addition, it was found that among the four subscales of BGT-II, recall, motor and perceptual phases had the highest power, while the copying subscale had the lowest power for differentiating different groups. This test is not able to rule out organic brain pathology from psychiatric patients, but it could differentiate brain damaged and psychiatric patients with severe symptoms from normal subjects.