The Role of Somatic Symptoms on Further Understanding Depression  

Depression is a mental disorder that has been occurring more frequently in people as the years go by. While there is on official way to diagnose depression and provide treatment as stated in the DSM, this disorder it remains much of an enigma to many psychiatrist and psychologist, as there are constantly new advances and so much more understanding to this mental illness. One possible outlook that people are gravitating towards in hopes of unravelling this complex disorder is through somatic symptoms. Somatic depression is a sub-category of depression much like is more well know counter-part pure depression. Somatic depression entails more psychosocial factors such as gender role limitations that lead to the mental illness, whereas pure depression focuses on the chemical and hormone making (1). While somatic depression is still new and more extensive research is yet to be conducted to understand its correlation with depression, it could serve as a prominent tool to understanding depression better. 

Depression is a mental illness that is highly noted to be more prevalent in women that in men. Now somatic depression is being investigated and its role in the development of adolescents and the difference in gender ratio. As stated before, a possible cause of somatic depression is gender role, and this refers to gender limitation in society. Acknowledging that there exists a gender inequality for women, a correlation was made between that an increase in somatic depression from early to late adolescences (1). A pattern of somatic vs pure depression from early to late adolescents was made using data from a systematic sample, the conclusion ended up being that somatic depression was more prevalent in females than men being 10.7% to 3%, and as for pure depression there wasn’t much of a difference with 2.8% to 2.3%(1). Interestingly enough data also showed that the somatic depression in females increased from 7.4% to 13.3% percent from early to late adolescences, while pure depression only increased from 2.5% to 3.0%(1). Henceforth, this is demonstrating a developing pattern that connects role inequality to an epidemic of somatic depression of female developing from their early to later years in life. 

Looking into somatic depression and its impact on understanding depression, research has been conducted to demonstrate somatic depression being more common in females, but how about the effectivity of anti-depressants on this type of depression. A large study was conducted known as the STAR*D was done to test this idea, involving 4,401 participants and a system to diagnose not only pure depression but somatic depression, where an individual had to had three or more of the following symptoms ranging from disordered eating to aches/pains (2). Individuals were also tested by levels, where each level provided different types of anti-depressants, level 1 started with Citalopram and they moved to level 3 taking an arrangement of medications. The results would go to show that the individuals that were diagnoses with somatic depression were most common with females, and somatic patients exhibited less remission compared pure depression patients when administered medication from level 1 or 3 (2). While, there still more research to be done to further comprehend the relation between pure and somatic depression and how they impact anti-depressant capacity, the results are intriguing of how there is less remission in patients with somatic depression when given the same anti-depressants. 

             In addition, it is believed that patients with somatic symptoms and major depressive disorder have two times less the remission rates than those that don’t (3). Nevertheless, research has been conducted to see the connection between these somatic symptoms and achieving a diagnosis of MDD patients that may have a worst prognosis as of result of these symptoms. In a study that was organized to show how somatic symptom cluster would serve as a prognosis for two-year patients with MDD. The study was divided into four somatic symptoms clusters, where it was determined that people with 2 or more of these somatic cluster were greatly at large for having an MDD follow up, which the percentage was 42.8%(3). Overall, this study showed how somatic symptoms could be used to identify patients with a worse set of major depressive disorder, this leads to the question of what treatments can be done in order to combat these patients with severe MDD? 

Literature Cited 

Brett Silverstein, Patricia Cohen, Stephanie Kasen, Should additional symptoms be included in criteria for atypical depression?,Psychiatry Research, Volume 144, Issue 1,2006, Pages     87- 89. 

Brett Silverstein, Priya Patel,Poor response to antidepressant medication  of  patients  with depression accompanied by somatic symptomatology in the  STAR*D Study,Psychiatry Research,Volume 187, Issues 1–2, 2011,Pages 121-124, 

Ella Bekhuis, Lynn Boschloo, Judith G.M. Rosmalen, Marrit K. de Boer, Robert A. Schoevers, 

The impact of somatic symptoms on the course of major depressive disorder, 

Journal of Affective Disorders,Volume 205,2016, Pages 112-118,