What Your Handwriting Reveals About Depression

Have you ever studied your own handwriting? Did you know that your script could be used to assess your psychological state? The German child psychologist Wilhelm Preyer once observed that writing in fact originates in the brain rather than the fingers — so handwriting is, in truth, the brain's writing (brainwriting) (1895). In recent years, as research and literature on graphology have become more widespread, it has gradually come to be recognised as a tool that can reflect a person's psychological state. Among these efforts, the University of Florence and Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta in Rome published a study in 2018 examining whether handwriting analysis is effective as a tool for assessing depression, and ultimately arrived at positive findings — demonstrating that graphological psychological analysis can be used to assess depression (Giannini et. al, 2018). 

In a study led by Marco Giannini, a psychology professor at the University of Florence, the team assessed whether graphological psychological analysis could serve as an objective and effective tool for the early diagnosis of depression (2018). The researchers first observed the handwriting of thirteen patients with depression and studied the features of their script in depth. They then invited eighty participants aged between eighteen and sixty-five to take part in the study, sorting them into two groups: a clinical sample and a control sample. The clinical sample comprised twenty-four women and twenty men who had been diagnosed with severe depression, while the control sample comprised eighteen men and eighteen women who had not been diagnosed with any mental illness. Each participant was then asked to handwrite a short passage of around fifteen sentences read aloud to them, and to sign their own name. The team subsequently invited four Italian experts to analyse this handwriting, without telling them anything about the participants' psychological diagnoses or which group they belonged to. In the end, the study reached a positive result and successfully established an objective guide for assessing the symptoms of depression.

How handwriting corresponds to the symptoms of depression

1. Sadness and pessimism: irregular letter size, narrow spacing between letters, laboured writing, a downward slant.
2. Self-dislike and worthlessness: irregular letter size, uneven pressure while writing, hesitation, an upward slant, script that is short and weak.
3. Guilty feelings: lighter script, broken and disjointed strokes, a cautious hand, larger spaces between letters.
4. Indecisiveness: wavering script, hesitancy, laboured writing, an uneven axis to the script, frequent corrections, an arched shape to the script.
5. Tiredness and/or fatigue: slow, flat strokes, a downward slant, script sinking to the right, trailing extensions, lighter script, a tendency to fade away.
6. Psychomotor slowdown: slow strokes, sluggishness, larger and uneven spaces between letters.
7. Agitation and irritability: laboured writing, impatience, impulsiveness, irregularly jumping script, an upward slant, irregular letter size, uneven pressure, uneven spacing between letters, an uneven axis, entanglement, smudging.

All of the above are writing features that people with depression may exhibit (Giannini et. al, 2018). That said, although this study made substantive progress in psychological analysis and surfaced the potential clinical usefulness of graphology, truly using handwriting analysis as a diagnostic tool for depression would require far more experimentation and testing before it could meet the scientific standards of psychology and psychiatry. Graphology still faces no shortage of scepticism, yet the findings of this study also succeeded in showing that it can still be used as a reliable and effective clinical diagnostic tool.

References

Giannini, Marco, Pellegrini, Pietro, Gori, Alessio, & Loscalzo, Yura. (2019). Is Graphology Useful in Assessing Major Depression? Psychological Reports, 122(2), 398-410.

Preyer, William 1928. Zur Psychologie des Schreibens mit besonderer Rücksicht auf individuelle Verschiedenheiten der Handschriften. Leipzig: Leopold Voss.

The History of Graphology. The British Institute of Graphologists. (n.d.). https://www.britishgraphology.org/about-british-institute-of-graphologists/the-history-of-graphology/. 

Ved, V. (2020, June 14). Depression: 2 Easy Ways to Accurately Detect It from Handwriting. Write Choice. https://www.writechoice.co.in/writechoice/depression-handwriting/. 

What Your Handwriting Says About Your Health. The Dr. Oz Show. (2021, March 12). https://www.doctoroz.com/article/what-your-handwriting-says-about-your-health.