Article Review About the Correlation Between Depression And Environments

This article goes into discovering more about the types of people who are more prone to becoming depressed, exploring lifestyles and personalities and searching for a correlation between the two. The article was written by Janice Wood Wetzel and Franklin C. Redmond in September of 1980 and was written for The University of Chicago Press, and is titled “A Person-Environment Study of Depression. ”

The article goes into specifics on a 300 person study about how different personality traits, how surroundings can affect an individual, and how the statistics can reflect how certain things affecting certain types of people can lead to depression. It can be related to one of the core principles of social work philosophy is empowerment, and how independence and set-determination can be a factor in self-actualization and a large factor in determining the state one’s mental health. It can also be related to ecological theory, in that the bio-psycho-social perspectives are something that is looked upon in the study and that also that it is correlated with the environment that an individual is in. What is the difference between 150 Depressed People and 150 Non-depressed People? The study that is written about the article consisted of 300 black, white, and Hispanic participants, 150 of them being depressed and the other not. Each person had a correspondent with a similar background. It talks about how there are certain unique factors in a person’s environment and personality can be acute in determining depression. One thing that they found is that actual psychological traits were not as reliable across all environments, but rather whether or not they dependent or independent. Another interesting observation they found was that a large singular traumatic event was rarely ever the cause of clinical depression, but rather that several smaller things adding up, consistently, was usually the cause.

Some behaviors and attributes, though, are extremely common among people who are dependent. Lack of interest in things around an individual and lack of interest in the individual themselves, being easily impressioned by outside influences, “low-risk taking” are things usually associated with dependent people, and and people who had attributes unlike these were usually independent. The way the measured the circumstances and attributes was the Moos scale, which involved an analytic procedure assessing the supportiveness of the individual being assessed, because supportiveness in one’s environment is a large factor in the difference between dependence and independence, the most important variable being family. Work environments were also a variable, workplaces with supportive environments were usually something present in those who didn’t have depression. For women specifically, the evidence showed that they were more vulnerable to depression because their environments were more susceptible to being identified as unsupportive, whether or not they were independent. The same was applicable to men in similar circumstances.

Unipolar depression was also easier to diagnose than bipolar depressives. The Feighner criteria, which was used in determining a diagnosis of depression, meant that an individual met 5 out of 8 of the following: (1) poor appetite or weight loss, (2) sleep difficulty, (3) loss of energy, (4) agitation or retardation, (5) loss of interest in activities or decreased sex drive, (6) self-reproach or guilt, (7) diminished ability to think or concentrate and (8) recurrent thoughts of death or suicide. The article concluded that about 70 percent of people who fell under the “independent” category were not depressed, while about 70 percent of people who fell under the “dependent” category were.