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Social network determinants of depression

Molecular Psychiatry volume 16, pages 273–281 (2011)Cite this article

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A Corrigendum to this article was published on 19 November 2010

Abstract

The etiology of depression has long been thought to include social environmental factors. To quantitatively explore the novel possibility of person-to-person spread and network-level determination of depressive symptoms, analyses were performed on a densely interconnected social network of 12 067 people assessed repeatedly over 32 years as part of the Framingham Heart Study. Longitudinal statistical models were used to examine whether depressive symptoms in one person were associated with similar scores in friends, co-workers, siblings, spouses and neighbors. Depressive symptoms were assessed using CES-D scores that were available for subjects in three waves measured between 1983 and 2001. Results showed both low and high CES-D scores (and classification as being depressed) in a given period were strongly correlated with such scores in one's friends and neighbors. This association extended up to three degrees of separation (to one's friends’ friends’ friends). Female friends appear to be especially influential in the spread of depression from one person to another. The results are robust to multiple network simulation and estimation methods, suggesting that network phenomena appear relevant to the epidemiology of depression and would benefit from further study.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Laurie Meneades, Rebecca Joyce, Molly Collins, Marian Bellwood and Karen Mutalik for the expert assistance required to build the analytical data. We thank Maurizio Fava for helpful comments regarding the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    J N Rosenquist

  2. Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    J N Rosenquist

  3. Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    J H Fowler

  4. Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, USA

    N A Christakis

  5. Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    N A Christakis

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  1. J N Rosenquist
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Correspondence to J N Rosenquist.

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Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on the Molecular Psychiatry website (http://www.nature.com/mp)

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Rosenquist, J., Fowler, J. & Christakis, N. Social network determinants of depression. Mol Psychiatry 16, 273–281 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2010.13

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