London - The old saying has it that if you laugh the world laughs with you and if you weep you weep alone.
Now, the saying – coined in the 1880s by American poet Elizabeth Wheeler Wilcox – has been shown to have some truth to it.
A British study found that happiness is infectious, but you cannot “catch” misery.
Scientists from Manchester and Warwick universities analysed data on 2 000 high school pupils from the US.
The teenagers were asked to name up to ten friends and all were then quizzed on their mental health, twice over a year. Their answers revealed that happiness was contagious, with someone’s good mood tending to rub off on their companions.
The effect was so powerful that having a network of upbeat friends doubled the odds of recovering from depression. It could even prevent the descent into depression in the first place.
The results suggest that in head-to-head comparison, friendship would “massively outperform” treatments for depression, such as counselling and drugs, the Royal Society journal Proceedings B reports.
One in five Britons suffers from depression at some point in their lives, and existing treatments do not help in up to a third of cases. Anti-depressants are also expensive and can cause side effects.
Manchester University researcher Thomas House said: “More work needs to be done but it may be that we could significantly reduce the burden of depression through cheap, low-risk social interventions…It could be that having a stronger social network is an effective way to treat depression.”
Unlike happiness, misery was not catching. In other words, the study showed that being friends with someone who is depressed will not give you the condition.
Daily Mail