Depression is a common illness and it affects more women than men. However, the reasons why some women get it and others don’t are not well understood. Within the SWS we are trying to identify some of the reasons why depression develops in young women. Women interviewed during the second half of the survey were asked to complete a short questionnaire about their levels of anxiety and depression. They were also asked to give their consent for us to examine their notes at their GP’s surgery more than two years after the initial interview, so that we could find out if they developed depression in the two years after our nurse interviewed them. In this way we aimed to find out if the things that we asked about at interview are likely to influence the risk of depression. We were particularly interested in looking at the effects of family and social circumstances, financial difficulties, women’s diets, and their own birth weight.

Over 7,000 women completed the short depression questionnaire and we have been able to assess the GP notes of over 5,000 of them. So far, our analyses have shown that women who suffer most from financial strain are at greatest risk of depression. We also investigated whether a low folate diet was associated with depression and found that it was not associated with risk of developing the disorder.