It is almost a cliché to say that we are social animals. But the fact that we are has very deep implications for both our biology and our psychology.
We are born utterly dependent; from the moment we pop out, a social relationship becomes essential to living, namely the relationship with our mother (as well as other family members). Through that dependency—for physical survival and mental, social, physical, and sensory stimulation—we form connections with other people who become significant in shaping our view of ourselves and of the world around us. That socialization process also structures the brain in important and enduring ways. Through the complex processes of socialization, families can create in their members, and especially in their children, either susceptibility or resistance to depression that can last a lifetime.
The notion that depression can be spread strictly by social means as a social contagion is supported by a great deal of evidence. For example, there is now neurological evidence that the apathy and withdrawal of mothers who have postpartum depression show up in the baby's brain as an underdeveloped emotional region. Such mothers are constricted in their emotional displays and do not engage with the baby the way nondepressed mothers do—talking in a singsong voice, playing games, stimulating the baby. That deficit in the brain, along with other related risk factors, dramatically increases the likelihood that the child, too, will become depressed.
Epidemiologic evidence also points to the major role of contagion factors in depression. The rate and nature of depression vary dramatically from culture to culture—unlike with schizophrenia, where roughly 1 percent of the population is affected no matter the culture sampled. The World Health Organization recently declared depression the fourth leading cause of human disability and suffering and predicted that by the year 2020 it will be the second leading cause. That's not biology run amok; it reflects the social spread of the kinds of cultural values and social conditions that give rise to depression.
Further evidence that moods spread through social interaction is found in the social lives of depressed people and their loved ones. The depressed have far more difficulty than the nondepressed in their social experiences. They have more family arguments and more marital arguments. They have less relationship satisfaction and are significantly unhappier. And they deplete everyone around them, spreading social pain and further corroding social relationships in an ongoing vicious cycle.
"It's exhausting," says Sarah Paul, 50, manager of records for an insurance company in Seattle. "My husband is depressed much of the time. He can suck the joy out of things faster than anyone I've known. It's hard on me because I feel like I can't talk about negative things very often; he's already so down. It's so frustrating I also deal with depression."
Paul voices concern for their 6-year-old daughter. "I worry how she is going to turn out with two depressed parents. I grew up that way, and I think that's why I'm with my husband. When I was single, my number one desire was to find someone positive. But I married someone negative because the discomfort is comfortable; I know what to do. I'm concerned about what I'm modeling; I don't want my daughter to continue the cycle."
Long-term epidemiologic studies show that depression intensifies from one generation to the next. Today's parents represent the largest group of depression sufferers raising the fastest-growing group of depression sufferers. We are on average four times more depressed than our parents and ten times more than our grandparents. This is not just a reflection of greater awareness of the disorder.
Depression is a disorder with many facets. There is a genetic vulnerability, although it is turning out to be smaller than many scientists thought. The larger contribution comes from the ways we learn to regulate our own internal experience, which includes our explanatory style (the meaning we attach to life experiences), our cognitive style (how we think and use information), our coping style (how we manage stress and adversity) , our problem-solving style, and our relational style.
All of these are acquired through socialization forces in the family, the modeling and transmission of enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. We learn to think and to interpret and respond to events through the cumulative effect of our socialization—the kinds of parenting received, the kinds of explanations offered, the influence of family members, the teachings of others.
There is a near-perfect correlation between a parent's explanatory style and a child's. Every time a child asks, "Why, Mommy?" or "Why, Daddy?" the explanation provided invariably embodies a particular style of thinking and attributions of causality. Each question is a vehicle for the transmission of thinking that interprets events in a way that is congruent with external reality or that reflects more subjective or hyperemotional responses.
"Why didn't Uncle Bob come to the picnic, Mom?" There's a world of difference between "He must be mad at me" and " I don't know, the next time we talk to Uncle Bob let's ask him." There are also the kinds of attributions that reflect a permanently negative perspective: "Mom, I tried to do this and couldn't, would you help me do it?" "No, you'll never be able to do it, it's too hard."
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