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Issue date: Jan 3, 1999
Why women are
often depressed, anxious
In this article:
 Odds
for depression for women
Odds
for anxiety
Special Report: The Brain
Back
to "Brain index"
 en and women show differences - but also
a vast commonality - in emotional processing. To be sure, both sexes
have a capacity to feel love, sadness, fear, happiness, guilt, anger,
jealousy and myriad other emotional nuances. "But women, for whatever
reason, seem to be more talented than men in experiencing and developing
their emotions," says Michael E. Thase, M.D., a professor of psychiatry
and a depression expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine.
For both sexes, a normal emotional repertoire is highly adaptive.
Those who have no fear, for example, lose that energizing jolt of
"fight or flight" adrenaline that accompanies a serious threat,
and gets us out of trouble.
"On the other hand," says Steven Hyman, M.D., director of the
National Institute of Mental Health, "one of our hypotheses is that
it's possible in some people for these normal, adaptive emotional
responses to get stuck in a very bad 'on' position." In general,
more women than men have these problems.
Go to top
The odds of
depression are bad - especially for women
Depression strikes 17.6 million Americans a year. In any given
year, the risk of getting depressed is 5 percent if you're a man
and 10 percent if you're a woman. Extend this over the course of
a lifetime and the odds double.
"Women start out with a greater capacity to feel," explains Thase,
"and if you then factor in the societal imbalance of power and the
disproportionate share of problems that fall on women, you can start
to see how events conspire to increase female depression risk."
Depressed men are apt to eat and sleep less and to feel agitated;
depressed women, to eat and sleep more and to feel persistent fatigue.
Men tend to worry about the impact on job performance, and attempt
to cope by distracting themselves from their feelings. Women tend
to worry about the impact on family and other relationships. Instead
of denying their feelings, they are more likely to brood.
Go to top
The odds of
anxiety are even worse
Even more common are the anxiety disorders that afflict a staggering
23 million each year.
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