Depression Talk

A multi-country study of babies pubished in Psychiatry Research suggests that babies who spent some time in an incubator after popping out of the womb were 2 to 3 times less likely to develop depression when they become adults. The theory is that the incubator acts like a surrogate womb and help eases the newborn’s transition to the real world. Who the heck was funding this study? The makers of baby incubators?

Study Specifics

The study took place from 1986 to 2007 on 1212 kindergarteners in the Quebec area. The study didn’t go into why Quebec kindergarteners were spotlighted. Is Quebec a particularly depressing place to live? Oh, Canada. Anyway, the kindergartener’s birth records were looked at and then they were updated every once in a while until they turned 21 to see if they were depressed or not.

Things factored into the study were “family adversity”, gender, birth weight and maternal depression. I have been trying to discover what they study means by “maternal depression” (does it mean the mother was depressed before she got pregnant or post-partum depression?) Whether or not both parents had depression does not seem to have been a factor and for that reason, I really can’t take this study seriously.

All Teenagers Are Depressed

Ok, I don’t mean that with 100% seriousness, but have you ever met a teenager or college kid who wasn’t depressed? And if they weren’t depressed then narcotics were usually involved somehow. The human race is, what 4 or 5 million years old and the reason most of us get depressed is because we didn’t have an incubator after birth? If that were true, then how did our species survive for so long?

Can’t Ignore Genetics

Studies on identical twins (with identical genetic makeup) raised has shown that both twins wind up with depression a whopping 76% of the time. One starts manifesting symptoms and then the other one does, too. If both parents have bipolar disorder, then all of their children have a 50 - 75% chance of also going through the hell that is bipolar disorder.

And, in a very informal study done on my part, everyone I know who has depression has had at least one parent that’s been diagnosed with depression (if they knew who their parents were, that is).