A brief post about missed opportunities....
Last Friday at a conference, a professor presented a huge, several years-long, multi-million pound study into the relationship between heart attacks and depression. In the early 90s, a group of academics in Toronto found that depressed patients fared worse, both physically and mentally and across a wide range of measures, after a heart attack. Twenty years later, a similarly huge study in Manchester used a vast array of sophisticated quantitative measures to establish a similar link between depression and poor outcomes following heart attack. They also found that those who were depressed *before* their heart attack fared considerably better than those who developed reactive depression afterwards. The single greatest influence on both physical and emotional wellbeing was whether or not the patient had a "close confidante" to talk to. As a counsellor, this didn't surprise me but it did make me wonder whether medical staff ask what emotional support people have before they are discharged, as I suspect the focus might be on physiological recovery.
However, what I found most frustrating about this study was that for all the time and money spent and all the sophisticated scales of measurement used, nobody asked the "depressed before" patients *why* they believed their mood was better following their attack. Which, in my opinion, was a massive missed opportunity. Might it, for example, be because surviving a life-threatening health crisis encourages people to develop a different outlook on life? I realise that an individual study can't necessarily pursue every angle but as this was an unexpected finding, I would have thought researchers would follow it up. Perhaps further research is ongoing as a separate project?
I think in psychology though, the obsession with using standardised scales and measures can really get in the way of understanding peoples' actual experiences. I think there is great value to introducing a qualitative dimension to more studies. For me, it's not enough to know that something is going on, I want to know why and what it means to the people involved. Identifying trends and tendencies is all very well, but in failing to unpick these further, we are missing out on what we could have learned.
