Examining Directional Association between Depression and Anxiety

Music City Center 

Depression and anxiety are debilitating and prevalent diagnoses with wide-reaching negative psychological and economic impacts. Clinicians note that depression and anxiety, although distinct conditions, often occur together in patients, with little information explaining such comorbidity. In absence of information on the underlying aetiology of these diseases, some clinicians hypothesize that one trait may predispose another, thereby inducing a direction of dependence between these psychological traits.

The Intern Health Study (IHS) examines self-reported depression and anxiety among doctors in residency programs in the US. Being able to establish a sense of directionality between anxiety and depression to understand the dominance between these two mental health outcomes is critical to develop adequate clinical diagnostics and administer medical intervention. We propose a novel information-theoretic coefficient that leverages Shannon's entropy metric used to examine directed dependence between anxiety and depression. The proposed method is evaluated by simulation studies and applied to IHS data, where a dominating effect of depression on anxiety is observed in medical interns.

bivariate causal discovery

information theory

mental health outcomes 

Mental Health Statistics Section