Depression has many causes. Figuring out how stress is involved is harder than it may seem.
Stress gets blamed for a lot of things. Did you gain a few pounds? Blame stress. Say something you regret. Blame stress. But what about something more serious like major depressive disorder? Stress often gets the blame for serious mental illness, but we know that ourafflicts an estimated 280 million people worldwide, many of whom would point to stress as a contributing factor to their depression.
Next, the researchers looked at the characteristics of the stressful events. At the risk of blaming the victim, events such as divorce could be partly due to the depressive nature of the individual. By contrast, events such as the death of a loved one should be independent of the depressive nature of the individual. Researchers found that even these independent stressful events, in which the individual had no role, led to the onset of depressive symptoms.
The researchers next took advantage of the fact that their participants were twins. This allows for the assessment of the impact of genetics on the stress-depression relationship. Monozygotic twins share 100 percent of their genes. Examining the relationship between stress and depression in these twins effectively controlled for the effects of genetics on the development of depression.
It's not all doom and gloom, however. The good news is that of the over 2,000 women tested in the study over five years, only about 300 of them developed major depressive disorder. What are the characteristics of these 1,700 women who did not develop depression? The answer to this question may allow us to promoteKendler, K. S., Karkowski, L. M., & Prescott, C. A. . Causal relationship between stressful life events and the onset of major depression.
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