Imagine this experiment. A sample of close to 250 adults living independently, many females, and many in their 70s are given one of two prompts to read. Both prompts begin the same way: You are 70.
From there, the prompts go in different directions. Half of the papers say You have been feeling unusually sad for the last few weeks. The other half reads: You dont seem to be able to enjoy things that you used to, like watching TV or reading the newspaper.
Both prompts were part of a study reported in the Journal of Applied Gerontology . After their different beginnings, the prompts went on to describe a set of similar symptoms, including sleeping problems, constant exhaustion, loss of weight and appetite, and lack of concentration. At the end of the prompt, the people in the sample group were asked what they thought is wrong with the fictional person.
Although BOTH prompts described a depressed person, only 40% of the participants were able to correctly identify the symptoms.
Only 48% of the group who read about the fictional person being unusually sad were able to identify them as depressed. That compared to 33% in the second group who were able to identify the person as depressed. Often, when we think of depression we imagine people being sad and weepy all the time. While that is one form of the disease, there are other types of depression which are harder to detect.
