Category: Depression

The activity increases liveliness and reduces stress, depression and aggression.

Staring at some trees — even those in the city — can reliably reduce stress.

Even a small amount of exposure to trees is enough to boost mood.

And, the more dense the trees, the better, the study is the first to discover.

For the research, people were given mildly stressful tasks, such as preparing a speech and doing maths in front of a judges while being recorded.

Afterwards they were shown cityscapes in 360-degree videos.

The experimental trick was that the videos were manipulated to contain various amounts of trees.

They ranged from none to around 70% coverage.

The results showed that the more trees people saw in the cityscape, the quicker they recovered from their stressful talk or impromptu math torture.

Trees, it seems, are a little like medicine, the more you take, the bigger the effect (medical types call this a dose-response effect).

On the other hand, the side-effects of trees are restricted to feeling inadequate for not knowing their names and slipping on wet leaves.

It reminds me of shinrin-yoku or ‘forest bathing’, which I write about in 10 Remarkable Ways Nature Can Heal Your Mind:

“The Japanese are big fans of walking in the forest to promote their mental health.

The practice is called shinrin-yoku, which literally means ‘forest bathing’.

One study conducted by Japanese researchers has found that the practice is particularly useful for those suffering acute stress.

Their study of 498 people found that shinrin-yoku reduced hostility and depression as well as increasing people’s liveliness compared to comparable control groups.”

If you can’t find any trees near you, then the ocean will do to reduce your stress, according to this study I reported recently.

Should trees and water be beyond your reach, then try changing your desktop background to a forest.

When it all gets to much, minimise all your windows and stare at it longingly until a sense of deep and lasting peace returns…

…or until someone notices you’re not doing any work.

The study was published in the journal Environment and Behaviour (Jiang et al., 2016).

This is even better than having a view of a natural green space out of the window.

People who live with a water view have better mental health, new research finds.

It is the first research to find a link between ‘blue space’ (as opposed to ‘green space’) and mental well-being.

If you ever wondered why properties with a water view command such a premium, this could be part of the answer.

Dr Amber L. Pearson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Increased views of blue space is significantly associated with lower levels of psychological distress.

However, we did not find that with green space.”

Other research, though, has found a link between green space and mental well-being:

Urban Living: Green Spaces Improve Your Mental Health

And even glancing at a simple grassy rooftop has some cognitive benefits:

The Surprising Mental Benefit To Glancing At a Grassy Rooftop for 40 Seconds

The research involved residential locations in Wellington, New Zealand.

The city is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Tasman Sea to the north.

The researchers took into account people’s sex, age, wealth and other factors, but still found a link between seeing water and better mental health.

The same effect was not seen for green spaces, but this might be a shortcoming of the research.

Dr Pearson said:

“It could be because the blue space was all natural, while the green space included human-made areas, such as sports fields and playgrounds, as well as natural areas such as native forests.

Perhaps if we only looked at native forests we might find something different.”

The study was published in the journal Health & Place (Nutsford et al., 2016).

The brain is not the only organ healed by prompt depression treatment.

Effective treatment of depression can also benefit heart health, a new study finds.

Depression treatment reduces the risk of heart failure, heart attack and stroke, the research found.

Dr Heidi May, part of the team involved in the study, said:

“Our study shows that prompt, effective treatment of depression appears to improve the risk of poor heart health.”

The results come from examining the medical records of 7,550 patients in the Intermountain Healthcare database.

They found that if untreated, depression led to around a 30% higher chance of cardiovascular risk.

Those who were successfully treated for depression, though, had the same cardiovascular risk as those who were not depressed.

Dr May said:

“With the help of past research, we know depression affects long-term cardiovascular risks, but knowing that alleviating the symptoms of depression reduces a person’s risk of heart disease in the short term, too, can help care providers and patients commit more fully to treating the symptoms of depression.

The key conclusion of our study is: If depression isn’t treated, the risk of cardiovascular complications increases significantly.”

Dr May continued:

“There’s little publically-available data about this question.

But now with the help of Intermountain’s depression registry, we have the ability to start answering some of these difficult questions.

What we’ve done thus far is simply observe data that has previously been collected.

In order to dig deeper, we need do a full clinical trial to fully evaluate what we’ve observed.”

The study was presented at the 2016 American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

Image credit: dierk schaefer

Do depressive genes mean you will develop mental health problems?

A family history of depression alone does not determine whether you will suffer from depression, a new study finds.

Instead the environment is a major factor.

The conclusions come from a study which bred rats to be depressed.

After receiving “rat psychotherapy”, though, the rats returned to normal and demonstrated non-depressed blood biomarkers.

Professor Eva Redei, who led the study, said:

“The environment can modify a genetic predisposition to depression.

If someone has a strong history of depression in her family and is afraid she or her future children will develop depression, our study is reassuring.

It suggests that even with a high predisposition for depression, psychotherapy or behavioral activation therapy can alleviate it.”

Rat psychotherapy involves putting the rats in large cages which the authors describe as like ‘Disneyland’ (but presumably in a good way!).

The large cages contained lots of toys and places for them to play and hide.

The rats were put in their playground for a month before they were tested for depression.

How to tell if a rat is depressed

Here’s how you check if a rat is depressed: you put it in a tank of water.

If the rat swims around looking for an exit then it is not depressed.

If the rat just floats — it is depressed and has given up hope.

The study is good news for people with a family history of depression, Professor Redei said:

“You don’t have people who are completely genetically predisposed to depression the way the rats were.

If you can modify depression in these rats, you most certainly should be able to do it in humans.”

The study was published in the journal Translational Psychiatry (Mehta-Raghavan et al., 2016).

DNA person image from Shutterstock

3,961 people from 29 different studies were included in the analysis.

Depression is more than a mental disorder, it affects the body’s ability to detoxify itself.

It should be seen as a systematic disease that affects the whole body, argues a new study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Accepting that depression affects the whole body could help explain why people experiencing depression are more likely to suffer from cancer, cardiovascular disease and to die younger.

All of these problems can be combated, however, by the usual treatments for depression: talk therapy and/or medication.

The conclusions come from examining the results of 29 previous studies.

These looked at how depression affected the bodies of 3,961 people in different ways.

The studies consistently found that depression was linked to oxidative stress in the body.

Oxidative stress refers to an imbalance in the body which hurts its ability to get rid of toxic substances.

The researchers found that after normal treatment, the body recovers relatively quickly.

After successful treatment, the bodies of people who were formerly depressed are virtual indistinguishable from healthy people in terms of oxidative stress.

The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (Jiménez-Fernández et al., 2015).

Depression image from Shutterstock

In the US, women are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with depression at some point.

Women’s high rate of depression could be partly related to lower wages, a new study concludes.

In the US, women are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with major depression at some point.

However, the research found that for women who were paid the same as their colleagues, there was no difference in depression diagnoses between men and women.

For women who were paid less, though, their risk of suffering from major depression was 2.5 times higher.

Mr Jonathan Platt, the study’s first author, said:

“Our results show that some of the gender disparities in depression and anxiety may be due to the effects of structural gender inequality in the workforce and beyond.

The social processes that sort women into certain jobs, compensate them less than equivalent male counterparts, and create gender disparities in domestic labor have material and psychosocial consequences.”

One explanation for the effect of wages on depression could be that women internalise a message of inferiority, said Mr Platt:

“If women internalize these negative experiences as reflective of inferior merit, rather than the result of discrimination, they may be at increased risk for depression and anxiety disorders.”

The results come from a US survey of 22,581 adults aged 30-65.

Women were matched with men based on their education and years of experience.

Dr Katherine Keyes, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings suggest that policies must go beyond prohibiting overt gender discrimination like sexual harassment.

Further, while it is commonly believed that gender differences in depression and anxiety are biologically rooted, these results suggest that such differences are much more socially constructed that previously thought, indicating that gender disparities in psychiatric disorders are malleable and arise from unfair treatment.”

Dr Keyes continued:

“Structural forms of discrimination may explain a substantial proportion of gender disparities in mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. adult population.

Greater attention to the fundamental mechanisms that perpetuate wage disparities is needed, not only because it is unjust, but so that we may understand and be able to intervene to reduce subsequent health risks and disparities.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science & Medicine (Platt et al., 2016).

Depressed woman image from Shutterstock