Exposure To TV Leads To Depression

Teenagers who are greatly exposed to TV and other electronic media, highly raise the risk of developing depression in young adulthood, especially men, according to a new U.S study.
Dr. Brian A. Primack, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and his colleagues conducted a study, which began in 1995, and analyzed the television viewing habits of 4,100 healthy adolescents. The participants were asked how many hours per day they spent watching TV, playing video games or listening to the radio (the survey was conducted before DVDs or the Internet became widely available), during the past seven days. None of the adolescents had symptoms of depression at the beginning of the study.
The adolescents reported an average of 5.7 hours of media exposure each day, including 2.3 hours of television viewing, 0.6 hours of video cassettes, 0.4 hours of computer games and 2.3 hours of listening to radio.
Seven years later (at an average age of 22 years), all the participants underwent screening procedure and it was found that 308 (7.4 per cent) teenagers had developed symptoms consistent with depression. According to the report, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, for each extra hour of TV viewed each day, the adolescents had a significantly greater chance of developing depression in young adulthood. "In the fully adjusted models, participants had significantly greater odds of developing depression by follow-up for each hour of daily television viewed," the authors wrote.
Given the exact same amount of media exposure, young women were less likely to develop symptoms of depression than were young men.