Demoted major change in financial status divorce and retirement from work Each life event was then assessed using the following range of responses -3 = extremely positive . if an event had no impact or did not occur a value of 0 was indicated. Because positive life event do not tend to cause the type of life stress that could potentially lead to though about depressive relapse only negative life event were used in the analysis for the present study . to obtain a total score which could range from 0 to 141 responses to all negative life events were summed. The total scores were classified as high negative impact medium negative impact or low negative impact. The reliability of the instrument for this study was 0.84.