207. What Research Says About DEPRESSION feat. Dr. Steven Hollon
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Today's guest is Dr. Steven D. Hollon— the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. His work focuses on the etiology and treatment of depression in adults, with his research showing that cognitive and behavioral interventions for depression can be as efficacious as and more enduring than antidepressant medications.
In this episode, we discuss:
+ Why Dr. Hollon became interested in studying depression
+ What percentage of the population actually struggles with depression
+ Ways we should be thinking about the current mental health crisis
+ The process of self-reflecting on depression & what people get wrong
+ Evolutionary mechanisms behind our symptoms of depression
+ Effective treatments for depression other than antidepressant medications
+ How changing your thoughts and behaviors through CBT can affect depression
+ What makes someone more likely to have repeated episodes of depression
+ Why adolescents can be more vulnerable to depression
+ Two crucial things you can do to stop a depressive episode
+ Trusting adolescents to make positive changes for their mental health
+ so much more!
Mentioned In The Episode…
+ ABCT
+ "What we got wrong about depression..."
+ Seligman & Maier on learned helplessness
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Episode Sponsors
⚡ This week's episode is sponsored by Magic Mind. Get your Magic Mind here: https://magicmind.com/SHEPERSISTED20 You get 20% for one time purchase and up to 48% off for subscriptions with my code: SHEPERSISTED20.
About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)
After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.
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Sadie: Welcome to She Persisted. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a 19 year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of Penn. She Persisted is the Teen Mental Health Podcast made for teenagers by a teen. In each episode, I'll bring you authentic, accessible, and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness.
You can expect evidence-based, teen approved resources, coping skills, including lots of D B T insights and education in. Each piece of content you consume, she persisted, Offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle, while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.
So let's dive in this week on She persisted.
Dr. Hollon: self reflection is a two edged sword.
It's good to be paying attention to what's going on in your life. I think where people get stuck, at least the folks we usually see clinically, they've gotten into blaming themselves for things that have gone wrong. , close to I didn't study hard enough for the test or as opposed to, , you know, most relationships or practice relationships and you get better with it with practice, etc.
We take it to heart and we blame ourselves. We think we're unlovable or we think we're incompetent when that's not the case.
Sadie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of She Persisted. I'm so excited you guys are here today. It's officially final season. Yesterday was my last day of class, so things are busy, we're a little bit stressed, so many things on the calendar , a day to day basis, During finals season, you guys know I'm really sensitive with my sleep schedule. It's like my number one non negotiable when it comes to my mental health. And I always like to take a proactive approach, and so I know during finals I have less flexibility with when I can be sleeping not that I'm not getting enough sleep. sleep, but it's definitely more limited than it is usually. I don't have as much flexibility and that also means I have to be really cognizant about my caffeine intake. Like, I want to be drinking more coffee because I feel a little bit more tired, but I also don't want that recurring cycle of being exhausted, drinking a bunch of caffeine, and then I'm not able to fall asleep that night, which is why I am partnering with Magic Mind and I'm officially a Magic Mind ambassador.
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So in addition to finals, it has been very busy because I just went to A BCT, which is also known as The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. It is a huge convention. This year it was in Philadelphia, and so a ton of clinicians and researchers all gathered to talk about what's going on in the field, talk about new research.
I went to a bunch of panels on social media and mental health. I went to a bunch of panels on depression. It was really incredibly interesting, and I was so excited because I had recorded with Dr. Holland, who's this week's guest speaker. guest before ABCT, so I got to go meet him IRL and hear him talk with a bunch of other really incredible clinicians and build on this conversation that we had.
But if you're not familiar with ABCT or CBT or Dr. Holland's research, Dr. Stephen Holland is a professor at Vanderbilt.
He's at the forefront of depression research. He's an extremely prominent researcher within the field, and his research is on how behavioral interventions can treat depression. So how that can be an alternative and sometimes even more effective than antidepressants, which typically are like that front line approach, that first line intervention for depressive symptoms.
So to give you guys a little overview, because this is a more research related episode, we're going to talk about why Dr. Holland became interested in this area of research. We talk about how many people actually struggle with depression, like how much of the general population actually gets depressed.
we talk about his perspective on how we should be viewing the mental health crisis that we're in. We talk about. self reflecting on depression and what most people get wrong. We then dive into the evolutionary mechanisms behind our symptoms of depression. Like, depression serves a purpose.
Obviously, we live in a very different environment than the one that we evolved for, which is like caveman days. So what is depression trying to tell us that maybe the message isn't getting clear because we live in a different context now? We talk about different interventions other than antidepressants that are effective in treating depression, that the research shows that they really work.
We talk about how changing your thoughts and behaviors through CBT can affect depression. So your quick little TLDR on CBT is that There is this cycle of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. And your emotions impact your thoughts, and your thoughts impact your behaviors, and it's a continued cycle. And the idea is that when we experience a lot of distress, when we're depressed, when we're anxious, when we're not able to function in our day to day lives effectively, there Something with the way that we're behaving or thinking isn't going as effectively as it could.
So how can we intervene and adjust that cycle? And with CBT comes exposure therapy and behavioral activation. And we'll get into some of those in this episode. but that's your CBT is like the triangle. And how can we change our thoughts and behaviors to shift our emotions? Then, Dr. Holland and I talk about what makes some people more likely to get depressed over and over again, rather than just experience depression one time.
We talk about why adolescents are more vulnerable to depression, which is really interesting, one of my favorite topics to touch on. We talk about two things you can do to stop a depressive episode. lastly, we talk about trusting adolescents to make positive changes for their mental health. This was one of my favorite episodes to date.
Again, I'm giving you the warning that it's a lot of research, but you guys are going to enjoy it and it's so relevant and impactful. And I'm so grateful to Dr. Holland for taking the time to sit down with me and it was great to get to meet him at ABCT. So I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation. I will be getting back to studying for finals.
And with that, I hope you guys have a great week. I will see you on Monday for a mini episode. As always, make sure to share with a friend or family member, post on social media, tag repost. I really appreciate you guys. We're almost at the end of the year and we just did Spotify Wrapped and it was so cool to see how many new listeners we have here, how many people from different areas of the world are tuning in, what episodes you guys like the best.
So, loved seeing that. So appreciative, you guys, and I'm gonna stop yapping so we can get into this conversation So let's dive in.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on She Persisted. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. , we know how many young adults struggle with mental health, but there's this really, really big gap between the research that's happening and what we know about depression and anxiety.
And podcast. What teens are aware of when they start struggling or when they have a friend or a family member going through it. And so moving, we can lift the curtain a little bit in an accessible way. And I'm just really grateful that you're taking the time for this conversation.
Dr. Hollon: Please.
Thank you.
Sadie: So to give people a little bit of a background, if they're not in undergrad studying psychology and really into reading all the literature, what made you want to study depression and, , these different mechanisms and symptoms that are associated and dig deeper? What drew your interest?
Dr. Hollon: Yeah, I, for whatever reason, I've been interested in depression for as long as I can remember.
It's never paid much attention to the Bible, but the book of Job, I thought was interesting. most of all men could be, , , tormented by God, , and, , it just, it, it's kind of in the family. It's seven. I've had my own episodes of depression and the, in the past, , my father did, and it was just always seemed interesting to me.
Lincoln, Churchill, , some of my favorite people have histories of depression. Yeah.
Sadie: Yeah, yeah, it's something that impacts so many people, and I think what's also really interesting about it is like when we think of those people and they come to mind, we don't think the first thing about them is that they're depressed, but when we're experiencing it ourselves, it's so different.
It often is like, that's the biggest part of my life, or this is such a crucial part of my identity, and so, in so many aspects, there's that huge shovel standard.
Dr. Hollon: Yes, very much. Very true. Yeah.
Sadie: Yeah. So how I came across your work is I am a member of a lab at the University of Michigan. , and The PI actually came on the podcast and he's doing research about how we think about depressions.
Like if we think about the chemical imbalance theory, , versus it's a signal, how does that impact how much people engage in treatment and then their outcomes? And so we read your paper, , about what we got wrong about depression and as a field, what maybe hasn't been as effective. And I think Again, there's this gap.
So a lot of the things that you mentioned, maybe people aren't seeing a difference yet when it comes to intervention or going to therapy or getting support. And so I was wondering if you could speak to us, , in your career, what you have noticed first, , about like things maybe we haven't gotten totally right.
And then also if there's things where you're like, I think that's accurate. I think that's valid, , from the research side.
Dr. Hollon: Yeah, sure. Happy to do that. there are a couple of things. number one, depression, at least unipolar, non psychotic unipolar depression is a lot more common than we aware of before.
And, you do the retrospective epidemiological studies, the estimates still make it a very, , common, , clinical disorder about 30%. 16 percent of the population, , 20 percent of women, 12 percent of men are going to have one or more major episodes of major depression in their lifetime, again, non psychotic, , unipolar, , turns out that's, that's about three to five times lower than the actual base rates.
If you follow a cohort from birth on. Or across the course of adolescence, which is where it usually, kicks in for people. , what you find is the rates are well over 50%. for example, the Daneen cohort study, birth cohort study, and, , folks are just in their 40s now, mid 40s, and already more than half of the folks in the sample have had depressions.
And the other thing that we weren't prepared for, we've always assumed that depression was quite recurrent. If you have one depression, you're going to have a Series of of multiple episodes. It turns out that's not true either turns out for most folks They're going to have one or two episodes in their life In response to really bad things that happen to them.
You lose a loved one You lose a job that you really cared about you don't get into medical school Whatever that may happen to be but most folks aren't going to have a lot of depressions a smaller subset of people Probably the 15 to 16 percent are the ones that have multiple episodes And those are the ones that end up coming in for treatment.
Those are the folks we really study So we've gotten a biased look at what depression is really like, it's, it's so common you almost talk about it as being species typical. Anybody can get anxious, anybody can get angry, and virtually anybody can get depressed.
Sadie: What are your thoughts on, we're like, in the mental health crisis, there's a lot of this messaging that that's a bad thing, that this is species typical, and that this is a shift from like, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, do you think it's really That non judgmental approach of like, this is something we struggle with and we can adapt accordingly or you're like, we're on a bad trajectory.
This is an issue. We got to shift.
Dr. Hollon: Well, I think, I think it's something that we can understand. I think we can, , , , deal with. I think it's, , actually, , it's, I think it's almost a bit of a growth experience. All that being said, I think the last thing you want to do for people coming into adolescence is cut them off from their friends.
, 14, 15 year olds ought to be with the 14, 15 year olds, not locked away, , , on the internet because they can't go out in, in public. So I think, I think the, , notion that rates are up is true. , but that's the last thing you want to do to young teens. And I think that's elevated the rates of depression.
, it's almost a sense of isolation. I do think that if you don't take it the wrong way, if you don't interpret it as a sign of weakness as much , as, , part of a developmental process that ideally get a chance to go through, then you don't take it as, as quite as seriously.
Sadie: Yeah. It also gives you a lot of empathy for, like you mentioned, these big life experiences, whether it's grief or being rejected.
Like, we all have that happen, and if we didn't, we wouldn't understand those intense, large emotions. And we know, like you mentioned, relationships are. so important for everything. So having that emotional experience, although incredibly uncomfortable, it in turn will strengthen those other relationships down the line.
Dr. Hollon: think you're absolutely right. It's a miserable experience to go through. On the other hand, anxiety keeps you safe. Pain keeps you from damaging the already injured tissues and depression keeps you thinking carefully and seriously about the things are important in your life and that's not a bad thing to happen.
Sadie: Yeah, I'm sure this will get into a little bit of the intervention and CBT side of things, but ideally you would experience a down day, a couple of days, maybe it's a couple of weeks, and you'd be like, I have to think about this, something in my life isn't going correctly, but I think a lot of people run into a wall.
Either there's not that awareness, like, I'm depressed and Not that you shouldn't feel that way, but like, how can I shift my behaviors and emotions? What do you do when people aren't having that self reflection or they're not able to make those changes around them?
Dr. Hollon: Yeah, I think, and again, I could be wrong here, but I think that self reflection is a two edged sword.
It's good to be paying attention to what's going on in your life. I think where people get stuck, at least the folks we usually see clinically, they've gotten into blaming themselves for things that have gone wrong. Yeah, close to I didn't study hard enough for the test or as opposed to, , you know, most relationships or practice relationships and you get better with it with practice, etc.
We take it to heart and we blame ourselves. We think we're unlovable or we think we're incompetent when that's not the case. So what we try to do with somebody who's clinically depressed is get them testing that out. Consider, , what kind of behavioral experiments they could run. If you've had a bad experience in a relationship, , try, other kinds of relationships or other additional relationships and see if it's really true that you're unlovable or you just went about the last one the wrong way.
If you're not, , getting what you want out of your, , , profession or job, career pursuits, et cetera, , try a little harder, try something different. But it's usually not the case that people are accurate when they make a global stable internal attribution to some defect in the cells.
It's usually something in their behavior. And they can work.
Sadie: Yeah. Do you think that's something that we are learning from a societal perspective or do you think that's more internal? I'm sure the CBT process is reinforcing it. When we think about like the behaviors and the cognitions and the thoughts we're having, it just becomes like a self repeating cycle.
But where do you think that stems from for specific people? People are
Dr. Hollon: wired up for that.
Sadie: Okay,
Dr. Hollon: I'm very much interested in the evolutionary perspective and particularly this fellow Paul Andrews at McMaster. He might find interest at some point. , no evolutionary biologists would think about anxiety, pain or depression as being, , , aberrations.
They would think of this being evolved adaptations that served a purpose. And what they would do is follow the energy. It's like, Political scandals should follow the money. They would follow the energy. And if you've got , an infection, the energy goes to the immune system. You don't want to date.
You want to think, you're not interested in food. If you're starving, the energy goes to foraging for food and, , preserving the vital organs. If you're clinically depressed, the energy goes to the cortex. And the energy goes to really thinking long and hard and carefully about whatever's going on in your life.
And that again, that's probably not a bad thing to do from time to time. You don't want to make a habit of it, but it's not a bad thing to do. What I think we do clinically in something like cognitive therapy is help somebody get unstuck when they focused on some defect in the self, which usually is not there as being the core problem.
So that that's where I think that goes, but I think we're wired up to, , think carefully about things when we get depressed. Okay.
Sadie: Yeah, we have these other really interesting mechanisms, like we're motivated to withdraw, even though being with people would be more effective. You mentioned self-reflection, even though maybe a little bit less would be more beneficial.
There's all these other interesting, you're eating more, you're eating less, you're sleeping a lot, you're more irritable and pushing people away. Are there any other mechanisms of depression that potentially have these evolutionary stems that. , offer a lot of validation and compassion, like, okay, this is not crazy to people that are struggling.
Dr. Hollon: Right. Right. Or that would, , some of the things you just mentioned, for example, the withdrawal, the, , , loss of appetite, et cetera, predate human beings. They predate cortex. you can get molluscs without much cortex that do those things. That's part of our older immune response. And probably what goes on to depression grew out of, , depression.
The way we dealt with infections, , so things that would conserve energy, were still there. What's new for human beings is the cortex getting involved and really trying to solve problems. So, , again, I don't, , I hate to see folks get stuck and I can remember a couple of times in my life when I got stuck, but it was usually when, , I was able to start thinking about.
What steps I would take to arrive at a change what was going on in my life that I did. That's when I got unstuck. And I think that's basically do at least in a cognitive behavioral approach to treating depression.
Sadie: If people were going to get into all the things about CBT and why that can be so effective.
If people aren't working with a CBT therapist or , this is their first exposure to that. And they're like, okay, I'm curious. I want to learn more. What does that specific process look like to think less, ruminate less, be in that cortex less intensively?
Dr. Hollon: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. couple of things, there are self help manuals out there.
, , Dennis Greenberg and Chris Podeski have one of the best, think it's called Mind Over Mood, and it lays out what you might do with a therapist, without the therapist. There are, websites that you can go to, you get a little cautious there because it's like the Wild West.
Sadie: It's true.
Dr. Hollon: , you can, you can, , do those kinds of things. And it looks to be the case that there's not much you can do with the therapist that you can't do on your own, but especially if you have, , somebody working with a trainer that you're accountable to, , you can do on guided, , websites, but it works a little better.
If you have somebody that you have to. Report back to even if they're not necessarily therapists. So there are a lot of options now that we have. The other thing I should mention is, , cognitive therapy, cognitive behavior therapies are quite, , generally pretty useful. they have long term enduring effects, so they seem to reduce risk for subsequent episodes.
they're not the only ones that work. There's a, , simpler, , , behavioral activation approach, which doesn't pay attention to cognition at all, but seems to work, about as well. It's not been tested as often, but it's held well when, when has been tested, it might have an enduring effect.
Interpersonal psychotherapy, works quite nicely. the variety of psychological interventions that do seem to work pretty regularly, pretty reasonably. And the antidepressant medications They're much safer than what we had 20, 30 years ago. , I have concerns about long term reliance on medications because they don't have enduring effects.
And there's some reason to think, and I go back to somebody like, , Andrews and the evolutionary perspective that they might actually suppress symptoms at the expense of leaving you at risk for any point you try to stop, you're going to be dropped right back in the middle of an episode. So long term, I would prefer to see people have other options.
, a lot of these things work to take the edge off it.
Sadie: Yeah. Well, you elaborate on behavioral activation and what that looks like in the context of depression.
Dr. Hollon: Yeah. What we would do in something like cognitive therapy, which of course came out of Philadelphia, came out of, ,
Sadie: uh,,
Dr. Hollon: but what we, what we do in cognitive therapy is to get people to use their own behaviors to test the accuracy of their beliefs.
If for example, you don't think you can enjoy the party, go to the party and find out. Now, it turns out that most folks enjoy the parties more than they thought they would. , depression is, to use a phrase, is a disease of expectation and recollection. It lives in the future. It lives in the past.
At the moment, it's not that you can't enjoy. It's that you don't think you will, and you remember it differently after the fact. But we'll get people to run those kinds of experiments. If you don't think, , you can get into a school that you'd like to go to, apply anyway and see what happens. Apply to a bunch of schools and see what happens.
Sometimes you surprise yourself. And somebody who's depressed tends to turn a low probability into a no probability. If I talk with a graduate by going on to medical school or graduate school, the same with the chance of about one in 10, if they're depressed, they think that means don't apply as opposed to applying to 20 and you get to pick up.
, And then especially when it comes down to things like, , notion that if you have a bad relationship breakup and you think it must be something about me, you know, there may be things you did that didn't work well. You want to pay attention to that because you can change those. But if the notion is somehow basically unlovable, try additional relationships and they're not all going to work.
Some will, some won't. And, , it's a matter of taste. Same thing with jobs. Same thing with careers.
Sadie: How does that process evolve once you add in the thoughts element
Dr. Hollon: yeah, two things. behavioral activation, or the behavioral activation component of CBT, don't wait to feel like doing something.
Do what you would do if you weren't depressed and see how it turns out.
Sadie: And
Dr. Hollon: the cognitive element is don't believe everything you think. And what we'll do in cognitive therapy is try to encourage people to , check out how accurate the beliefs are, there's a, almost kind of a mantra. We try to encourage people to, , lock away on one is what's my evidence for that belief and the alternative explanation than the other one I just came up with.
And third, what are the real implications? And usually one or more of those three questions are going to help you sort out that. I don't know exactly what it is yet. Let me run an experiment and see where it's going to go.
Sadie: You mentioned in the What We Got Wrong About Depression paper, , and you mentioned this in the beginning, that there are some people that maybe never experienced a depression, there are some that maybe have an episode in response to a big life event, and then there's others that are I don't know if more prone would be the right phrase, but they have these multi episodes.
What makes me feel more likely to fit in that bucket?
Dr. Hollon: Well, maybe so. , the folks that we typically see in clinical settings have multiple recurrences. , most folks who get depressed don't have multiple recurrences. That's one of the We're just finding out. Then the question is, what makes the folks that have multiple recurrences different from the folks that don't?
And there are a host of things that may be going on. There may be some bit of genetics involved, although, , unipolar depression is not particularly heritable. It's less heritable than political preference. , that doesn't mean that, , particularly people that have early onsets may not have a little bit more of a genetic loading.
, it may be the people that have histories of childhood trauma, are a little more likely to get depressed. there's a curious aspect here in our evolutionary past. Depression seems to not show up much in Gree adolescence, but kicks in an adolescence. So if somebody's going to have a lifetime course of depression or even multiple recurrences, usually about half or more of those folks are going to have the first episode , when their adolescence may not get treated, but maybe the kind of thing that they remember.
And in our evolutionary past, that's when, , our species became reproductively capable. So you have to worry about, , sex, , the other, , gender and, , and getting pregnant and unipolar depression is twice as common in women as in men. And, , when you start thinking about maybe what we're doing here is having more cortical involvement to solve problems, nothing's more problematic to a young adolescent than relationships.
So exactly the time you want to be able to think carefully about stuff, that may not be a bad thing.
Sadie: So that interesting period, not necessarily pre adolescence, but adolescence, potentially, longitudinally follows this pattern. Is there anything else about that time frame or that time period that you think either environmentally is that additional stressor or the way we're thinking about things?
Rejection is definitely heightened. , any thoughts there?
Dr. Hollon: That's when we outgrow our families.
my wife's a developmental psychopathologist, works with, , particularly with adolescents. And that's about the time that, , reality becomes what your friends think it is. And 11, 12, 13, nothing's more important to us than how we think we fit in with our, with our friends, with our peers.
And, you can sometimes get a little stuck, a little overconcerned about that, but there's, there's a lot of drama and understandably, but that's where you, that's where you're sorting out who you are, how you get along with other people. And, , it's going to be, it's going to be a time of, , , testing your own, , , independence.
Yeah.
Sadie: Yeah. I'd love your thoughts right now a big theory floating around about why that period is is social media and phones, , have exacerbated issues, , with regard to mental health, especially in girls. Absolutely. Do you buy into that? Do you have other thoughts?
Dr. Hollon: I don't know for sure. , rates have gone up and it's hard to say exactly what rates have gone up, but they started going up even before the pandemic.
Certainly the isolation, the pandemic made it even worse My understanding is that junior high school is a cruel time for anybody, but if you can get, , unliked and like, I don't know all the things that happens on the internet, but a lot of stuff happens on the internet and I've got two young granddaughters.
I kind of hope they get protected from that right now. They're just watching. Disney princess films, but God, things are going to get worse in a couple of years.
Sadie: Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about thinking about things too much. It's like the internet feeds into that because it's not like you see your friends at school and maybe you see them across the lunchroom and you're like, they're talking to that person or they're not engaging with me.
It's like, they're not responding to my Snapchat, but I know they're online and I see them on Instagram. There's so much more information.
Dr. Hollon: So much more information and it's readily accessible. And I think it's easier to be cruel on the internet than it is in person.
Sadie: For people that have experienced depression in adolescence and they're like, okay, maybe potentially this might pop up again later in life.
Is there anything that you would recommend they do at this point in young adulthood to build that skill set? Think about this differently?
Dr. Hollon: Again, the, the, the two major things, and at once that straight behavioral activation component, which is wait to feel like doing something. If you would have done it, if you're depressive, do that anyway, make yourself do that and see where it goes.
You can get things moving more rapidly and then cognitively don't believe everything you think just because you think it's true, particularly if you're in a bad mood, , doesn't mean it is true.
those two things out. We're relatively bored. Interpersonal psychotherapy has some really good, , strategies for building relationship, et cetera.
And, , I don't want, , I don't want to, , short shrift them. It's another very effective clinical intervention. Yeah,
Sadie: I'm curious, , to, to get towards the end of our conversation, what you hope to see, , in the, field of depression research, what different areas you're curious about in the next 10, 20, 30 years, where you think we should be directing our energy or what you think we need to understand more about.
Dr. Hollon: great question. I think, , focusing on, , , just pre and post adolescence is particularly important. Again, my wife's a mental psychopathologist. And in her trials, she can take kids at elevated risk because they have parents with a history of depression and cut the risk of initial onset in half.
And same kind of strategy we do, , , for adults, but, , kids pick that stuff up.
Sadie: Yeah. Yeah. What does that look like when, , she's working to decrease the risk? Is it behavioral activation and, , not trusting what you're thinking or any other interventions? Exactly.
Dr. Hollon: The two catchphrases come from her.
Sadie: Oh, I love that.
Dr. Hollon: Yep. And, , she also trained a pen there with Marty Seligman. Yeah. Basically, yep. Adolescents can can do all of that stuff.
Sadie: Yeah,
no, I love that I took his class last semester it was incredible. , I got lucky because he hasn't taught undergrads in like seven years and I happen to be here when he was teaching undergrads.
But no, I, I think she's absolutely right, and I think a lot of people underestimate how well adolescents can internalize skills from a mental health perspective, like if you can learn how to think about those things differently, and how to manage your behaviors at that young age, you really are setting yourself up for success in so many ways, because prior to that, it's like, your environment and your schedule, which is largely determined for you, is doing a lot of the legwork.
You're not really building those mental health skills, and so, you know, You have a lot of agency and capacity, , and I, I don't know if we're trusting adolescents enough to be able to, like, remember and internalize and implement these things.
Dr. Hollon: I think you're exactly right. I, our experience has been that there's nothing an adult can do that an adolescent can't do.
the real change comes pre adolescent opposed to into adolescence, but 11, 12 on, that's, , just miniature adults.
Sadie: Yeah, yeah. , I love it. Well, if people want to continue to keep up with your research, where can they do that?
Dr. Hollon: have a website at Vanderbilt and we publish periodically , when you took the class, was that with DeRubis or Seligman?
Sadie: We took it with Dr. Seligman. He did the lectures for every single class and he had brought in a bunch of MAP graduates at T S T A. So it was really incredible.
Dr. Hollon: he was one of my, I think it was one of my three mentors along with Tim Beck and, , kind of in terms of my wife's primary mentor.
Sadie: Oh my gosh. That's incredible. Wow.
Dr. Hollon: He's absolutely marvelous and he and Steve Mayer did a paper came out in 2016 where essentially they said we got helplessness, learned helplessness all wrong.
Sadie: Yeah.
Dr. Hollon: Yeah. That marvelous thing. And most scientists make their theories more complex when they're inflicting data.
This guy said, no, we looked at it and we had it turned upside down. And you don't find many instances of that kind of courage in the sciences, but bless his heart for doing that. He always used to say that in science, the goal isn't to start right. It's to get right. a great role model for that.
Sadie: Yeah, no, we did the last couple classes on AI and where he wanted to see the field going and international conflict. Like he's very much early adopter thinking ahead. It's really, really incredible.
Dr. Hollon: Yep. Yep. Marvelous.
Sadie: It's amazing. Well, thank you so, so much for taking the time.
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