Depressed Toddlers Are Helping Science Understand Mental Health

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

You'd have thought that three-year-olds had it fucking easy these days. For a start, they all have iPads. Like: My wee baby cousin has been able to piss all over me at Angry Birds since about 2010, and it's not like I'm even an Angry Birds amateur. I am good at it. I play it on the bus.

"Joelistan," he says (he calls me Joelistan, and nobody in the family has worked out why). "Joelistan, you do have Angry Birds, don't you?" And I say: "Yes, I have it on my phone." And he says: "Then why are you so bad at it?" So not only am I getting beaten at Angry Birds by what now is a seven-year-old boy; I'm also getting bantered into oblivion by him along the way. I don't buy that kid Lego anymore. Fuck him. Fuck that kid.

But the point is that when I was a kid, legitimately one of my favorite toys was an army man that I wrapped a sort of paltry, flimsy parachute around and then dropped down the stairs. He floated for a bit, then three seconds later hit the floor. Then I went downstairs and untangled him and did it again. The 90s were awful and we should not bring them back.

So ​reading today that children as young as three can be depressed, I think back to that stupid little army guy and go: Well, yeah, that makes sense. And then I look at a current three-year-old—one who is better at operating Skype than I am—and I think: Hold up, that little shit is living in the future and doesn't even know it.

But then kids have a lot of pressures these days. They have to eat way more quinoa than I did when I was three. Even from nursery school they are put on a sort of educational factory line, with every B- on their handwriting homework another supposed nail in the coffin of their future career. Plus, we live in way more germaphobic times. How can you be happy if your mom won't even let you poke a dead rat with a stick? If you find a dead rat, you should be able to poke it with a stick. That is the rules.

But we're getting into that murky black-and-white, cause-and-effect, dead-rat-and-stick argument that muddies a lot of the conversation about depression. Instead, let's look at this ​new​ study by Washington University in St. Louis, which has found that the physical anatomy of children's brains can offer clues as to how the illness might develop in later life.

According to ​BU​PA, one in ten children will develop depression before the age of 18—sometimes they'll recover in less than three months, and sometimes they won't. In the US, it's estimated that 2.1 percent of children between the ages of three and 17 suffer from the illness in one way or another, and in the UK the adult depression stats currently ​hover ​around the 19 percent mark. That's a lot of people, young and old, who really can't face getting out of bed today.

But researchers, led by Dr. Andrew Belden, looking into preschool-aged children found that it's the part of the brain called the right anterior insula that can reliably predict the future risks of the illness. And they looked into how depression and guilt stayed with children as they aged, especially if they displayed signs of either at an early age.

"A child with pathological guilt can walk into a room and see a broken lamp, for example, and even if the child didn't break it, he or she will start apologising," said Belden. This is very useful information for me, because I am very clumsy and have broken more than one lamp at a party in my lifetime, and now I know that if there's a sad kid about then I've got a readymade fall guy.

More importantly, it's a useful study for those looking to garner a deeper understanding of an illness that affects so many people every day. After analyzing 129 children between the ages of three and six—47 of whom had been diagnosed with depression, and 82 who hadn't—researchers found two common strands among children who remained depressed into early adolescence: a noticeably smaller right anterior insula and, in 55 percent of cases, some deep and pathological guilt about all those lamps they keep breaking.

Belden reckons this research takes him closer to answering the "million-dollar question" about depression: Does a smaller insula predict a lifetime of depression and guilt, or does harboring depression and guilt from a young age squash and contort that little nestle of brain cells? Which is a very good question that nobody can really answer quite yet.

But what does all this mean for you, if you're already a fully grown depressed person? TIME MACHINE BACK TO WHEN YOU WERE A KID, DUDE. Or, slightly more realistically, keep eating cereal for dinner and just doing you and know that they've made a mental health breakthrough that connects the physical hardware of the brain to an illness affecting it.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter