Persistent depression is a more and more frequent condition to which psychiatrists worldwide are confronted, causing long hospitalization periods, high cost treatments and lack of productivity. The research we realized has the purpose to determine the role of social and cultural factors in long term hospitalized depressions. We studied a group of women (N=528) with severe depression requiring long hospitalization. We compared the results with those obtained for a control group (N=600) with short or medium hospitalization period. We have investigated the following variables: occupation, familial environment, level of education, marital status, association of psychotic elements (highly related to stress as proved by other studies) and age. We have correlated those factors with the duration of hospitalization for both groups. The lack of occupation appears to be a major factor in refractory depression. The social distress takes the second place as a risk factor, also with very significant difference. It appears that highly educated people are less inclined to develop persistent depression, as opposed to those with elementary education. The marital status doesn’t influence the duration of the depressive episode. The age>50 years seems to be in close correlation with persistent depression and finally, psychotic elements have significantly prolonged the depressive episode.