The findings published in Proceedings of the Royal Society supports previous research which has found that high-quality social relationships lower people’s risk of depression.

The study also challenges the notion that depression can spread or be contagious. Some studies have found that depressive symptoms tend to appear in “clusters” in social networks, with one claiming that depressive thought patterns spread between university roommates.

But this new study, which concentrated on a large adolescent population with different social networks, found that teens who initially scored as clinically depressed did not “infect” their friends.

One of the study's authors, Thomas House, a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Manchester, says he believes his new research has an advantage over others that have examined “clusters” of friends at once.

With groups of friends who are depressed, it’s possible there’s a third factor at play—maybe “they're all heavily drinking or they’re all doing something else that makes them more predisposed to depression,” House says.

“Our method wasn't susceptible to that because we looked at direct changes of state. We were pretty much directly observing this process of your friend influencing you. And the nice conclusion that we got was that your friends can protect you from depression and help you recover from it.”

We think this news calls for a celebratory Girls Night In..

For more info on mental disorders and how to get help visit mind.org.uk

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