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In a new study, researchers found that people who moved a lot in their childhood and early teen years are more likely to be depressed as adults.
Published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, this new paper out of Denmark and England found that moving around a lot in childhood had a greater effect on adult mental health than even childhood poverty.
Looking at more than a million records compiled for every person born in Denmark between 1982 and 2003, the researchers found that around 35,000 people, or 2.3 percent, had been given a depression diagnosis as adults.
While those who grew up in poorer neighborhoods did unsurprisingly appear to be more likely to be depressed as adults, the researchers found that even when adjusting for other individual factors, people who’d moved more than once between the ages of 10 and 15 were a whopping 61 percent more likely to develop depression than those who hadn’t.
“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” explained lead paper author Clive Sabel, a geographer at England’s University of Plymouth, in an interview about the research with the New York Times.
Sabel said that the research he undertook with colleagues from Denmark’s Aarhus University and the University of Manchester in the UK also suggested an inversion of the same principle.
“Even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once,” he explained, “your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods.”
Even more surprisingly, the research suggested that even adults who’d moved from poorer to richer neighborhoods as children had a 13 percent higher risk of depression. Comparatively, those who’d moved from wealthier to poorer neighborhoods as kids were about 18 percent more likely to be depressed as adults, per the research.
While the paper itself didn’t present any hypotheses about the effect, Sabel offered his own.
“It’s at a vulnerable age — at that really important age — it’s when children have to take a pause and recalibrate,” the geographer speculated in his discussion with the NYT. “We think our data points to something around disruption in childhood that we really haven’t looked at enough and we don’t understand.”
All the same, Sabel insists that on one huge data point, the research is clear.
“The literature does clearly point to having stability in childhood, especially early childhood, is really, really important,” he told the newspaper.
More on childhood and mental health: Childhood Cat Exposure Once Again Linked to Schizophrenia
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