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To assess the extent of your depression will help loneliness
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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People tend to understate or overestimate the seriousness of their psychoneurological symptoms, depending on whether they live in a cheerful or depressed environment.
Although depression has long been considered a serious mental disorder to be treated, it is difficult to diagnose it competently. Here, in many respects, one must rely on the complaints of the patient himself, and it is not always possible to prove their objective nature through analysis. Scientists from the Warwick Institute (England) found that people with mental disorders evaluate their own condition, depending on the social environment in which they live.
In an article published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, psychologists describe the results of studies in which people with depression or those suffering from an obsessive sense of anxiety were asked to assess the severity of their symptoms. It turned out that the person in this case compares his own state with the mental health of those who surround him. And if around there are people with a depressed mood, then their condition does not seem to him too serious. And vice versa: in case comrades and acquaintances seldom fall into depression, in this case the slightest depression of mood will be considered by them as a serious sign calling for an immediate appeal to the doctor.
Researchers note that assessing one's condition can be affected not only by the state of health of "relatives and friends", but also by the general understanding, so to speak, of the nation's mental health. And it can fluctuate strongly enough. For example, 10% of the participants in the study were convinced that half of the people were depressed at least half a month, while the other 10% felt that depression does not take us more than 2 days a month. Such a dispersion was also in assessing the "popularity" of the obsessive anxiety: there were 26 disturbing days out of 31 on one pole, only a week at the other.
The results of the study will be able to explain why such common mental disorders are so hard to determine correctly. For those who feel that the lousy mood is too damp, you can recommend more to trust your feelings and not compare yourself with others. In turn, doctors should take into account the "depressive" statistics there, they have to work: knowing the psychological climate in the district as a whole, it will be easier to establish a diagnosis in each specific case.
Let's remind, that recently scientists have presented the newest development on struggle against depression.