Depression is a serious battle is fought by many college students each day.
According to Dr. Edward Craighead, a professor in CU’s psychology department, between 15 and 20 percent of college students deal with depression their first year of college, and they may have co-occurring problems such as anxiety, substance abuse or eating disorders.
Craighead, who is on a leave of absence from CU and is teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, visited Colorado this week to continue his study of the causes of the re-occurrences of depression during college.
Craighead began this study in 1996. His co-investigator is his wife, Linda Craighead. Throughout the study, they have also had help from many graduate students.
While working at Duke University from 1985-95, Craighead noticed more students were becoming in-patients. It was clear to him that something was happening in late the ’80s and early ’90s in terms of student depression.
“The study of the re-occurrence of depression during college years is important because depression is, in terms of burden of illness, the fourth most burdensome disease,” Craighead said. “It has to do with quality of life, productivity of life and mortality. The rate of suicide is higher among depressed patients than any other disorder. Depression affects students’ ability to go to school, their grades and drop-out rates.”
Craighead’s study concerns major depressive disorder, a depression in which the patient is severely clinically depressed. All participants in the study have had full criteria for depression in high school. The study follows participants throughout their first two years of college.
“Of the 20 percent of students who have depression in high school, about half have a re-occurrence in college. We are now trying to figure out what variables trigger these re-occurrences,” Craighead said. “By understanding this, we can modify our prevention program. We want to rewrite the program to be re-geared to those occurrences.”
To recruit students for this study, each new school year Craighead and his team send out letters to all incoming freshmen around the first of August. The study is approved by the Institutional Review Board and the CU Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Office.
Students attend two sessions their fall semester of their first year of college and are paid $18 a session. Participants are also interviewed again in the spring of their freshmen year.
Each participant is also interviewed in the fall of their second year of college. In the spring of the second year, they attend an interview, which is 18 months after the process begins.
When Craighead and his team originally started the study, they had a high rate of students exhibiting both depression as well as a personality disorder. The following year, they had a low rate of participants who maintained both depression and a personality disorder, which created a significant difference in data from the first to second study.
“We are still trying to figure out why the first year the study worked and the next it was different. We are also trying to figure what variables predict a re-occurrence,” Craighead said. “The best predictor is if a person has a co-occurring personality disorder in addition to depression.”
Results from Craighead’s study have indicated that a personality disorder, as well as how severe the first episode of depression a participant experienced in high school, predicts if they will have recurring depression in college.
The study will continue this year, and the overall idea of the study is to work toward decreasing the relapse rate of depression. Craighead and his team have used two types of therapy treatments to prevent a relapse: cognitive behavior therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy.
“Our major objective now is to figure out what it is about personality disorders that causes those people who have been depressed and have personality disorders to have a re-occurrence,” Craighead said. “Then, we will be able to write a prevention of re-occurrence program that’s based on the data, and will work more effectively in preventing people from having a re-occurrence.”