Category: Depression

People in general become more forgiving as they get older — but one type of forgiveness reduces depression.

Women who forgive others are less likely to feel depressed, a new study finds.

This was unaffected by whether they felt others had forgiven them.

For men, though, forgiving others and feeling unforgiven was linked to higher levels of depression.

Self-forgiveness, meanwhile, had little impact on depression for either men or women.

Dr Christine Proulx, one of the study’s authors, said:

“It doesn’t feel good when we perceive that others haven’t forgiven us for something.

When we think about forgiveness and characteristics of people who are forgiving — altruistic, compassionate, empathetic — these people forgive others and seem to compensate for the fact that others aren’t forgiving them.

It sounds like moral superiority, but it’s not about being a better person.

It’s ‘I know that this hurts because it’s hurting me,’ and those people are more likely to forgive others, which appears to help decrease levels of depression, particularly for women.”

As people age, they have a tendency to look back on their lives and reflect.

This includes thinking about people who have wronged them and others they have wronged.

How people frame their personal history can change how they feel about their lives.

The research recruited over 1,000 people who were 67 years or older.

They answered questions about their psychological well-being, health and religion.

Ms Ashley Ermer, the study’s first author, said:

“As people get older, they become more forgiving.

Our population also predominately was Christian, which may influence individuals’ willingness to forgive and could function differently among individuals with different beliefs.”

The researchers were surprised to discover that self-forgiveness had little effect on depression.

The real key is to forgive others.

Indeed forgiving others really can lead to forgetting, according to another recent study.

Dr Proulx said:

“Self-forgiveness didn’t act as the protector against depression.

It’s really about whether individuals can forgive other people and their willingness to forgive others.”

The research was published in the journal Aging and Mental Health (Ermer & Proulx, 2015).

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Link between the gut and low mood found in study of mice.

Bacteria in the intestine can play an important role in causing anxiety and depression, new research concludes.

It helps explain recent research suggesting probiotics can stop sad moods getting worse.

Probiotics may work to help stabilise the bacteria in the gut.

Another recent study also found probiotics may reduce anxiety.

The new conclusions come from a study of mice which were exposed to stress early in life.

Dr Premysl Bercik, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We have shown for the first time in an established mouse model of anxiety and depression that bacteria play a crucial role in inducing this abnormal behaviour.

But it’s not only bacteria, it’s the altered bi-directional communication between the stressed host — mice subjected to early life stress — and its microbiota, that leads to anxiety and depression.”

In other words, anxiety and depression result from stress early in life plus microbial factors.

Early life stress on its own was not enough to cause the mice to behave anxiously, the study found.

Similarly, the bacteria in the gut on their own do not seem to cause depression and anxiety.

Dr Bercik explained how they reached this conclusion:

“….if we transfer the bacteria from stressed mice into non stressed germ-free mice, no abnormalities are observed.

This suggests that in this model, both host and microbial factors are required for the development of anxiety and depression-like behavior.

Neonatal stress leads to increased stress reactivity and gut dysfunction that changes the gut microbiota which, in turn, alters brain function.”

Naturally, as the study was carried out on mice, it will have to confirmed in humans.

Dr Bercik said:

“We are starting to explain the complex mechanisms of interaction and dynamics between the gut microbiota and its host.

Our data show that relatively minor changes in microbiota profiles or its metabolic activity induced by neonatal stress can have profound effects on host behaviour in adulthood.

It would be important to determine whether this also applies to humans.

For instance, whether we can detect abnormal microbiota profiles or different microbial metabolic activity in patients with primary psychiatric disorders, like anxiety and depression,”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (De Palma et al., 2015).

• Read on: Consuming a prebiotic bacteria can have an anti-anxiety effect

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Current antidepressants take around 3 to 8 weeks to kick in and only help around 50% of people who are depressed.

A new type of antidepressant holds the promise of treating depression quickly, without too many side-effects.

Professor Scott Thompson, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine who led the research, said:

“Our results open up a whole new class of potential antidepressant medications.

We have evidence that these compounds can relieve the devastating symptoms of depression in less than one day, and can do so in a way that limits some of the key disadvantages of current approaches.”

Currently used antidepressants, such as Prozac and Lexapro, target levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Unfortunately they are only effective in around half of people with depression.

Even amongst people they do help, it can take three to eight weeks for the effects can be felt.

For patients who are suicidal, this period can be excruciating.

Also, many now believe that targeting serotonin is not effective (see: Long-Held Belief About Depression Challenged by New Study).

The new compounds focus on another neurotransmitter with the acronym GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), instead of serotonin.

GABA mainly reduces brain activity in certain key areas related to mood.

The new class of compounds dampen down these inhibitory signals.

Theoretically, the result should be to lift mood.

Professor Thompson explained that preliminary tests on animals have been encouraging:

“These compounds produced the most dramatic effects in animal studies that we could have hoped for.

It will now be tremendously exciting to find out whether they produce similar effects in depressed patients.

If these compounds can quickly provide relief of the symptoms of human depression, such as suicidal thinking, it could revolutionize the way patients are treated.”

The study found that the compounds only affected the brains of stressed rats and left unstressed rats unchanged.

This may mean that the side-effects of the treatment will be less severe than those seen for current antidepressants.

The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology (Fischell et al., 2015).

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The way to react to stressful situations that protects your health.

Dealing with the minor stresses and strains of everyday life in a positive way is key to long-term health, a new study finds.

The research found that people who remained calm or cheerful in the face of irritations had a lower risk of inflammation.

Chronic inflammation can lead to health problems like cancer, heart disease and obesity.

The study provides further evidence of how people’s emotional response to everyday stressors impacts their health.

Dr Nancy Sin, the study’s first author, said:

“A person’s frequency of stress may be less related to inflammation than responses to stress.

It is how a person reacts to stress that is important.

Positive emotions, and how they can help people in the event of stress, have really been overlooked.”

The types of stressors the researchers studied included arguments at home and work.

Women were particularly susceptible to elevated inflammation if they didn’t deal well with stress.

Another of the study’s authors, Dr Jennifer E. Graham-Engeland, explained:

“We examined both positive and negative affective reactions to stress and compared the effects of stress exposure with responses to stressors.

Little is known about the potential role of daily stress processes on inflammation.

Much of the relevant past research with humans has focused on either chronic stress or acute laboratory-based stress — methods that do not fully capture how people respond to naturalistic stressors in the context of daily life.”

The study was published in the journal Health Psychology (Sin et al., 2015).

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New approach to cause of depression may help treatment using established therapies.

It’s often assumed that it’s depression that causes a pessimistic view of the future.

But it could be the other way around, a new study finds.

Being pessimistic about the future may actually cause depression.

Professor Martin Seligman and Ann Marie Roepke reviewed the research on prospection.

Prospection refers to how we think about the future.

Their conclusions are published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology (Roepke & Seligman, 2015).

They find that there are three ways in which thinking about the future may cause depression:

• Poor generation of possible futures.
• Poor evaluation of possible future.
• Negative beliefs about the future.

Depression also likely feeds back into more negative views of the future, creating a vicious circle.

Fortunately, these types of thinking can be addressed by talk therapies such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).

The study’s authors write:

“Prospection belongs front and centre in the study of depression.

Laboratory studies are needed to confirm that faulty prospection does drive depression and to help us determine how prospection can be improved.

We hope clinical scientists will invest in research on prospection to shed more light on a crucial and underappreciated process that may underlie much more than depression.

An understanding of how prospection shapes psychopathology may enable researchers to create more effective treatments and help distressed individuals to create brighter futures.”

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Why many find it so hard to support people who are depressed.

Some people, when they feel depressed prefer ‘negative validation’, a new study finds.

Negative validation is letting people know that the feelings they have are normal and reasonable in the situation.

Those who have low self-esteem prefer this type of comforting, as opposed to someone trying to cheer them up.

Professor Denise Marigold, who led the study, said:

“People with low self-esteem want their loved ones to see them as they see themselves.

As such, they are often resistant to their friends’ reminders of how positively they see them and reject what we call positive reframing-expressions of optimism and encouragement for bettering their situation.”

It’s a natural reaction to try and help ‘reframe’ the situation for someone who is feeling depressed.

We want to remind them about all the positive aspects of their lives and their situation.

However, as Professor Denise Marigold says:

“If your attempt to point out the silver lining is met with a sullen reminder of the prevailing dark cloud, you might do best to just acknowledge the dark cloud and sympathize.”

This is probably why some people find it hard to support those who are depressed.

They feel their natural way of dealing with depression — trying to cheer someone up — just doesn’t help.

For the study, the researchers used hypothetical scenarios, lab interactions and real-life instances of received support.

They discovered that some people found it particularly difficult to help others with low-self esteem.

Not only did their attempts to cheer the other person up not work, but they themselves felt worse about themselves and the relationship.

It is better to match support to the type of person.

People with high self-esteem don’t mind being ‘cheered up’, but those with low-self esteem prefer a more empathic approach.

The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Marigold et al., 2014).

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