PERSONAL HEALTH : This Is Just <i> Too</i> Depressing

More people than ever are seriously depressed, and younger people are hardest hit, according to a new report.

“It’s not just an American phenomenon,” said Myrna Weissman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s department of psychiatry, who analyzed studies involving 40,000 people in nine countries. “The dramatic shifts in rates of depression are observed all over.”

Her studies of thousands of people in Los Angeles; Baltimore; New Haven, Conn.; St. Louis, and Durham, N.C., found that about 8% of Americans will suffer major depression at some time and that the risk of depression is greater for each successive age group born since 1915.

In a new study reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., she found the same trends abroad: Overall, depression rates have increased and younger adults are getting sick at higher rates than their elders.

She also found that rates of depression varied drastically depending on events. For example, in Beirut, there was a marked increase in depression between 1950 and 1960, a period of great unrest. During the next decade, with a surge of economic stability, depression began to decline. The Lebanon wars between 1970 and 1980 led to another upswing of depression.