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Healthy friendships may reduce risk for depression among adolescents

Adolescents whose friends had healthy moods were significantly less likely to develop depression and more likely to recover from depression, according to study findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“There is evidence that social support is important for the mental well-being of adolescents and that befriending can have a positive effect on mental health. Recent experiments suggest that people’s expression of negative or positive emotions is influenced by the level of negative or positive news from their friends and associates,” Edward Hill, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, and colleagues wrote. “It is now very common to model infectious diseases as spreading processes on networks. This approach is increasingly applied to behaviors (eg, those related to infectious risk) and non-infectious diseases that are linked to behaviors that can spread socially (eg, obesity and smoking).”

To assess the transmission of mood among a social network of adolescents, researchers applied a model commonly used to track the spread of infectious diseases to a dataset of 3,084 individuals from the Add Health study, which collected in-home interviews to assess depression and healthy mood.

Analysis indicated depression does not spread, however, healthy mood among friends was associated with a significantly reduced risk for developing depression and increased chances of recovering from depression.

Specifically, having friends with healthy moods decreased risk for developing depression by 50% and increased the probability of recovering from depression by 50% over a 6-month period.

“This was a big effect that we have seen here. It could be that having a stronger social network is an effective way to treat depression. More work needs to be done, but it may [be] that we could significantly reduce the burden of depression through cheap, low-risk social interventions,” Thomas House, DPhil, PhD, of the University of Warwick, said in a press release. “As a society, if we enable friendships to develop among adolescents (for example, providing youth clubs) each adolescent is more likely to have enough friends with healthy mood to have a protective effect. This would reduce the prevalence of depression.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.