14 DAY TRIAL // When one partner in a romantic couple suffers from depression, the other is left largely outside the loop, in the sense that their needs are no longer considered. This condition can make people oblivious to their partners' needs, and this goes a long way towards eroding the relationships couples share.
The most common manifestations of depression are social withdrawal and the need to be alone. While this doesn't bother anyone when a depressed person is alone, it can have negative repercussions on another when the sufferer is in an intimate relationship.
Experts have determined in a new study that partners of people who are depressed feel as if their significant other is not even in the same room as them when a bout of depression strikes.
Additionally, as per the new research, those who suffer from this condition tend to become incapable of perceiving their partners' thoughts and feelings with any kind of accuracy, PsychCentral reports.
In the study, experts in Israel studied a measure called empathic accuracy, and its correlations with alienation and depression. Oftentimes, the three go hand in hand, and their individual effects are easier to discern if they are studied together.
Details of the work have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal edited by the Association for Psychological Science. The research was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ).
“It’s called the partner effect. Women’s depression affects their own accuracy. But it also affected their partner’s accuracy negatively,” says HUJ psychology graduate student Reuma Gadassi, the lead author of the study.
Experiments the study team set up revealed that women tended to exhibit less accuracy in determining their partners' feelings to more depressed they were. This correlation held true both in the lab and in their daily lives, researchers say.
For men, depression did not impede their empathic accuracy. Gadassi says that the effects male depression has on relationship dynamics are therefore different than women's, but not nonexistent.
The scientist also reveals that men tend to become less empathic as well, if women they live with, or are married to, are depressed. She explains this by arguing that mutual understanding and communication is the basis of any relationship.
“You can’t understand depression without taking account of gender. Bringing only the depressed woman into therapy is not enough. You really have to have both partners in the room,” Gadassi concludes.