According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 350 million people in the world suffer from depression . Now, new research has revealed that having friends that are mentally healthy and usually in a good mood can help someone recover from depression or even rub off on their good mood. On the contrary, having friends with a tendency to be depressed does not make us more likely to be depressed , according to the conclusions of the latest study carried out by the University of Warwick and Manchester (United Kingdom) and collected in the journal The journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Until now, depression was considered to spread like a contagious disease. However, this study refutes such a hypothesis. To do this, the scientists developed new mathematical models based on how an infectious disease spreads that they tested with data from 3,084 young people between 12 and 18 years old in which the participants were surveyed about their loss of appetite, interest, their sadness or your trouble sleeping .
The results of the study determined that having at least 5 good-tempered friends gives us twice the chance of avoiding depression in the next 6-12 months compared to someone who does not. Thus, the more friends in good spirits around us, the more the chances of falling into a depressive state are removed.
“ We have ensured that the method we have used is not biased by homophilia – -the tendency of people to associate with people who look like themselves- This would have affected our research,” explains Frances Griffiths, co-author of the study .
However, other scientists are not serious about the conclusions of this research: “ The study is not really clinically relevant , because it describes something that we already knew: that stable young people have good social contacts and suffer less depression. The study lacks a reference measure that measures the degree of severity of a depression ”, clarifies Martin Jung, an expert in psychiatry who did not participate in the work.
