Depression Can Be as Deadly as Smoking . . .

People with emotional illnesses – those we used to think of as psychiatric problems – are still often dismissed as not being really ill.  But most conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are associated with a shorter lifespan.  Now a number has been put on the increased mortality reported with depression, allowing it to be ‘relativized’; the Norwegian study is reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry.  

The researchers had a unique link between a health survey of more than 61,000 people and a database that provided their mortality information.  Over the 4 years following the initial survey, the mortality risk was increased to a similar extent in people who had depression as in those who smoked.  The actual risk of mortality for those with depression was 1.52 times that of non-depressed non-smoking people, whereas the increased risk for smokers was 1.59 times that of non-smoking non-depressed persons.  Of course, the finding doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between depression and earlier death, but it does  indicate a need for searching for possible reasons for the link that could be altered by therapy.

An additional finding in this study was that people who had anxiety and depression had a lowered mortality compared with depression alone.  This may be due to help-seeking behavior amongst the depressed-but-anxious subjects.  So maybe a little anxiety can be good for you.  But the main thrust of the article is the need for depression to be taken seriously, and treated assertively.  There are many effective ways to treat depression - including magnets!