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In a new study, researchers found that people who moved a lot during their childhood and adolescence are more likely to be depressed as adults.
Published in the diary JAMA Psychiatry Journal, This new study from Denmark and England found that moving a lot during childhood had a bigger effect on adult mental health than even childhood poverty.
Analyzing more than a million records collected on every person born in Denmark between 1982 and 2003, researchers found that about 35,000 people, or 2.3 percent, had been diagnosed with depression as adults.
Although, surprisingly, those who grew up in poorer neighborhoods seemed to be more likely to be depressed in adulthood, the researchers found that even when adjusting for other individual factors, people who had moved more than once between ages 10 and 15 were a whopping 61 percent more likely to develop depression than those who had not.
“Even if you come from the most disadvantaged communities in terms of income, not moving (being a ‘stayer’) was protective of your health,” explained the paper’s lead author, Clive Sabel, a geographer at the University of Plymouth in England, in an article published in the Journal of the American Society… Interview about the research with the New York Times.
Sabel said research he conducted with colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Manchester in the UK also suggested a reversal of the same principle.
“Even if you came from a wealthy neighborhood but moved more than once,” he explained, “your odds of suffering from depression were higher than if you had not moved and came from the poorest quartile of neighborhoods.”
Even more surprising, the research suggested that even adults who had moved from poorer to wealthier neighborhoods as children had a 13 percent higher risk of suffering from depression. Comparatively, those who had moved from wealthier to poorer neighborhoods as children were 18 percent more likely to be depressed as adults, the research found.
Although the paper itself did not present any hypothesis about the effect, Sabel offered his own.
“It’s at a vulnerable age, at that really important age, when children have to pause and recalibrate,” the geographer speculated in his discussion with the NYT“We think our data points to something about childhood disruption that we haven’t really looked at enough and don’t understand.”
Still, Sabel insists that on one big data point, the research is clear.
“The literature clearly points out that having stability in childhood, especially early childhood, is really very important,” she told the newspaper.
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