Your friends and family are there for you in times of trouble.
Your friends and family are the cause of your troubles.
Both statements may be true — and point to the fact that your social circle definitely plays a role in mood, but in indefinite ways.
[See: 7 Types of Friends You Need to Break Up With.]
The push-and-pull between support and stress is illustrated in the title of the book “Social Support and Stress.” In one chapter, the authors write that social supports are thought to both contribute to the generation of stressful events (known as the main effects hypothesis) and the avoidance of such events (the buffer hypothesis).
Other research finds discrepancies between men and women and those who are married and single. “Across all approaches, we find a robust result that for women, weak social support networks are associated with higher levels of depressive mood (the main effects hypothesis),” according to the authors of a 2012 study called Social Networks and Mental Health. “The magnitude of this effect is significant, and appears to be mediated through feelings of loneliness. Strong spousal support is also found to have a positive effect, but again only for women. We find no evidence that network membership either exacerbates or mitigates the effect of negative life events on depressive mood for either gender (the buffer hypothesis).”
Confused? No one said depression was always a clear-cut disease.
The Pros and Cons of Social Contact
In his book, “Against Depression,” Dr. Peter D. Kramer writes that both men and women experience adversity in similar ways. “Losing someone you care about can trigger depression; that part is universal. But ‘caring about’ covers more territory for women. A wider network of attachments entails more losses,” he writes. Women also suffer more small-scale emotional stress on a daily basis than men do, he believes, and this in part explains why women are diagnosed with depression far more often than men are.
[See: Am I Just Sad — or Actually Depressed?]
He calls this the “cost of caring” hypothesis. Social networks can not only be a cause of depression, they “throw into doubt the value of ‘social support networks’ as buffers against stress.” For women, the grief that larger networks cause can outweigh the benefits that these groups can generate. “So caring, which is a social good, turns out to be a risk factor for depression,” Kramer concludes.
But social isolation is also a risk factor for depression. And people today are more isolated than ever, says Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. “These days, people are more likely to get stratified by income or age,” he says. “People end up living in communities with people like them.”
Depression is characterized by “a focus on the self,” he says. “The antidote is to have contacts with others, which does not allow that focus on the self to stay there.” He advocates for casting a diverse net. “It is important to keep social contacts like they used to be in small towns, where people grew up with all different age groups,” he says. “We have lost a fair amount of that. Keep friendships as diverse as possible, for mutual benefit. The young will appreciate the wisdom we older folks can bring, and vice versa.”
That takes hard work, Goodwin acknowledges. “People should keep building as many social contacts as possible, at work or in their social environment and neighborhood. You have to really work at it.” That can be difficult with casual acquaintances, but what about family contacts, which are often at the heart of stress? He has a prescription for that as well. Family conflict can be diminished, “if one can marshal the courage to break through with an apology,” he says. “We all tend to respond to positives. We have to remember that all we need is a little bit of positive outreach and the person will welcome that.”
[See: How to Find the Best Mental Health Professional for You.]
Improved Relationships Can Improve Mental Health
The bottom line, it appears, is that socialization in itself is benign. What matters is the types of interactions you have with others. Michael D. Yapko, a clinical psychologist and educator, wrote a book titled “Depression is Contagious,” he says, “because depression is far more [a] social problem than a medical problem. The kind and quality of social contacts you have has a very marked effect on depression.”
Unhealthy thought patterns are more about nurture than nature, he believes. “If your parents were depressed, there is a higher risk you will be, too, having learned their way of thinking,” he says. And more people today don’t have a trusted confidant to help them through rough patches. “That’s important because if you are my good friend and I say something like ‘Everybody hates me,’ you can say ‘You’re wrong about that,'” he says. A good friend “can challenge your perspective and lead you to modify it.” A bad friend or acquaintance, or a toxic relative, on the other hand, can indulge your unhealthy beliefs and make things worse.
The key is to learn how to recognize and cultivate the former, and avoid or defuse the latter. Ellen Frank, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, recommends a form of therapy called interpersonal psychotherapy. “It works off the premise that depression develops in an interpersonal context,” she says. “Relationship quality is the key to whether we are depressed or not. Working on those relationships almost invariably improves depressive illness.”
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How Does My Social Circle Affect My Depression Risk? originally appeared on usnews.com
