Study Shows Percent of depressed men comparable to women

[BainsBane]

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The proportion of men who experience symptoms of depression may be similar to the proportion of women with depression when doctors look for non-traditional symptoms, according to a new study.

Researchers found that one third of both men and women met the criteria for a depression diagnosis when traditional and alternative symptoms - such as aggression and sleep problems - were taken into account.

"You end up getting very similar rates of depression," Lisa Martin, the study's lead author from the University of Michigan in Dearborn, told Reuters Health.

About 16 percent of Americans currently meet the criteria for depression, Martin and her colleagues write in JAMA Psychiatry. Previous research has found women are about twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with the condition.

More at: http://news.yahoo.com/percent-depressed-men-comparable-women-study-201105704.html

[BainsBane]

1. Broadening of list of symptoms for Depression

For the new study, Martin and her colleagues used data from a nationally-representative survey of 3,310 women and 2,382 men that is used to measure the prevalence of mental illness.

When the researchers used a scale that was designed to assess depression symptoms common among men, they found about 26 percent of men and about 22 percent of women met the criteria for depression.

When they used a scale that included both traditional and alternative symptoms, there was little difference between the two groups: about 33 percent of women met the criteria for depression, compared to about 31 percent of men.

http://news.yahoo.com/percent-depressed-men-comparable-women-study-201105704.html

[HereSince1628]

2. Similarity in prevalence is based on difference

Well, that's the sort of interesting juxtaposition of disparate concepts usually reserved for lyrics.

At one level this result is not surprising, but expected. When case definitions are expanded to create overlap, more cases are found. I suppose one could say that the resulting similarity in gendered diagnoses is evidence of some there there...even if the notion of creating fuzzier edges around diagnosis is inherently unsatisfying.

Setting that aside, I find a couple of things interesting...

First, research is being done to try to get a handle on gendered differences in expression of symptoms of mental illness. I'm glad to see that.

The failure of psychiatry, and the criminal justice system because of its reliance on psychiatric constructions, to recognize these differences results in many punishing incarcerations rather than resolving treatment for a number of pathologies.

Anger, frustration, anxiety and fear are examples of emotions with similar if not fully equiterminal behavioral expression in males. And that shared behavior is commonly judged to be socially inappropriate and indicative of dangerous potential requiring isolation from society. An historic example of such differences include the diagnostic bias, and subsequent bias in arrest and incarceration, of borderline and anti-social personalities between men and women.


Second, the authors of this research come right out and state that the differences in symptoms of depression are an acquisition from society. Their argument being that society endorses a quite limited range for masculine behavioral repertoire. The importance of that is these behavioral limits are LEARNED and not innate. Anger seems instinctive and biologically based in fight vs flight physiology. So much so that anger may seem about as learnable as sneezing.

But...then...researchers have quite recently come to understand that the sound we make when sneezing is actually LEARNED and it varies with language and within a language within subcultures.

It seems to me, that open-mindedness of clinicians to the existence of learned differences in emotional expression of depressive symptoms, the most common mental illness in America, has potential to broadly impact the lives of men.