Soon after I created my website Wing of Madness in 1995, I wrote an article about women and depression. At that time it was believed that women suffer from depression about twice as often as men do, although no one was sure why. Some hypotheses posed biological reasons, such as greater incidence of sexual assault and abuse and role in society.
I was never completely comfortable with the idea that more women than men were depressed. It didn’t seem to make sense to me. For one thing, most of the famous people with depression who came to mind (for me, at least) were men. Winston Churchill, Mike Wallace, Abraham Lincoln, Robin Williams and Terry Bradshaw, to name a few. Not that famous women didn’t come to mind, but I couldn’t come up with that many more women than men, if I could come up with more at all.
The other thing that bothered me, as it always does, is that there was no clear reason why women would experience depression so much more than men. I admit that I like to have reasons for things; I don’t want there to be unknowns when it comes to something like depression. And all the explanations for the disparity were vague at best. There were no hypotheses that had held up under examination as far as a definitive study.
2 Comments
I tend to believe that most men try to hide depression and illness so as to avoid judgment by their peers – to be weak is a fatal flaw in our pack mentality.
My impression is that you’re right, but they also try to hide any “weakness” from their wives/girlfriends, for different reasons.
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