Last week an old school friend shared this article about depression, on Facebook; being me I decided to find the original paper it’s based on. Luckily, there was a link to the paper in the article itself. The article was written, or published 4th May 2016, whereas the research paper was published 30th June 2016. Reading the article made me itch at it’s stupidity, mainly because they tried to hook their ‘positive outlook’ on to a meta-analysis of brain MRI data. So, today I thought I’d read through both the paper and the article and compare the two. What I learnt was that the paper is more interesting than the article, and that people will always try to use the results to support their position, even when it doesn’t.

Continue reading “Comparing the research paper to the popular press: depression”