Do family and friends help or hinder? A study on social capital and depression amongst university students in Singapore

Abstract

In Singapore, depression is the most common mental illness with 1 in 17 people having suffered from it at some point in their lifetime. Although there are previous research suggesting that social capital is associated with depression, few to no studies in Singapore has adopted a qualitative approach to explore the pathways and mechanisms between the two factors. This exploratory study hence attempts to study the relationship between network, cognitive and structural social capital and depression. Interviews were carried out with healthy and depressed individuals to elucidate how these three different dimensions of social capital may have affected their mental health status. The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale was used to measure depressive symptoms amongst respondents. The main findings from this study suggest that family and friends cognitive social capital have an association with depression while network social capital may not have. Social capital was also discovered to be not all good in the competitive context of the Singaporean society. Interview data also suggests that structural social capital work to alleviate depression only under certain conditions. Lastly, the study found that there might be a reciprocal relationship between depressed individuals and weak social capital. Ultimately, this paper seeks to illuminate possible linkages and mechanisms between social capital and depression and use them to develop effective prevention and intervention strategies to decrease the number of depression-related youth suicides in Singapore.