READ: Women who sleep around at university are 'more likely to become depressed'

Young women who have a lot of sexual partners when they start university may be more likely to suffer from depression, a new study warns.

Researchers looked at the links between casual sex and depression, sexual victimisation and sexually transmitted diseases.

They found that women who have casual flings are more likely to suffer from depression than people in ‘romantic’ relationships.

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They are also more likely to be victims of sex crimes and to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases.

A total of 483 female undergraduates, from a New York University, aged 18 to 25, completed 13 monthly surveys aiming to establish if ‘casual’ sex or ‘romantic’ sex could be more strongly related to depression, the likelihood of sexual victimisation and STIs.

They were asked in detail about their sexual experiences, and were asked to provide a definition of whether or not their experiences took place in a ‘romantic’ or ‘casual’ relationship. The subjects were also asked to record how many times they had had oral and vaginal sex.

The research team, from Syracuse and Brown Universities, defined a romantic partner as ‘someone whom you were dating or in a romantic relationship with at the time of the physical intimacy’.

A casual partner was defined as ‘someone whom you were not dating or in a romantic relationship with at the time of the physical intimacy’.

To measure depression the students were asked to take a test called The Patient Health Questionnaire commonly used to diagnose depression and its severity.

Sexual victimisation was assessed using a questionnaire that included details of different types of non-consensual sexual contact, ranging from groping to non-consensual sex.

The findings, published in The Journal of Sex Research, showed that early college hook-ups were linked to sexual victimisation and depression, but did not predict future depression.

Both casual and romantic sex were linked with STIs, and pre-college hook-ups were found to predict early college experiences of sexual victimisation.

A spokeswoman for the research team said: ‘Hook-up behaviour during college was positively correlated with experiencing clinically significant depression symptoms.

‘Sex in the context of romantic relationships was not correlated with depression. There are several reasons why hooking up, but not romantic sex, may be associated with poor mental health among women.

‘These include unfavourable attitudes toward sex outside of committed relationships, risk of acquiring a negative reputation, failure for the hook-up to transition to a romantic relationship , sexually unsatisfying hook-ups, and peer pressure or verbal coercion from partners to go further sexually than they want.

‘Although some of these issues may also arise within romantic relationships, most do not apply or occur less commonly in romantic relationships compared to hook-ups.

‘Indeed, dating relationships are perceived to involve more trust, intimacy, and social support compared to hook-ups, and they still appear to provide a more socially acceptable context for women’s sexual behaviour compared to hook-ups.

‘Although we found no correlation between depression and romantic sex, prior research has found that being in a romantic relationship is negatively correlated with depression and poor mental health - i.e. romantic relationships are actually protective - among young adults, especially women.’

-DM

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