The JAMA Psychiatry paper suggests an association between having peers diagnosed with a mental disorder and an increased risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life, indicating mental health issues could be socially transmitted.
Psychologists have long studied how moods and emotions spread, proposing that emotional contagion can lead to shared feelings of despair when witnessing a friend’s emotional pain.
For over three decades, research has shown mixed results regarding the impact of friends', peers', and families' mental health on individual mental health outcomes, pointing to the complexity of social influences.
The study analyzed data from 713,809 Finnish citizens, revealing that ninth-graders with classmates diagnosed with a mental disorder had a 5 percent higher risk of later diagnoses.
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