Gender differences and major depression in adults

Section A: The review

Abstract

Depression is the common health problem that is found in both men and women. Depression can be caused due to number of medical health problems, psychological problems or psychosocial factors among both genders such as interpersonal relationships, marital relationships, negative life events, nature-nurture, heredity and parenthood, social status and employment. Both male and female are vulnerable to the depression from these psychosocial factors. Due to paucity of men evidences of high rates of depression, several studies are biased in explaining the women depression. Male is also not found in abundance in the diagnosis and treatments of depression. This is because the early theories suggest that men usually mask their depression from externalizing acts, such as intake alcohol, smoking, and drugs. This also accounts that women in the society generally have to deal with the high rates of depression from the surroundings that happened to them.

Gender differences and major depression in adults

Introduction

Depression can be defined as the mental health problems or health disorder that is caused by the absence of the positive effect among the human beings such as the loss of interest and enjoyment in the ordinary things and experiences, low self-esteem, low confidence, nervousness, loss of control on emotions and likely other causes associated with the emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioural conditions of the human beings. The feelings of depression can last for the short-period of time such as six months or for the life time. One of the common types of depression is the major depression in which the person from the normal lows in life, feel unhappy and unable to enjoy the life. Medical science today has fully documented the risks of major depression on the health of adults. Depression can affect much more than mood such as physical health, memory and concentration, and affects the happiness and enjoyment in the life. The major symptoms of the depression is the poor appetite, loss of energy, insomnia, fatigue and tiredness, feelings of guilt, inability to think and concentrate and suicidal thoughts (Ryan & Shea, 1996). Depression is found to be common among the adults with the growing age (Glass, Kasl & Berkman, 1997), though depression is not necessarily dependent on the age. Several studies also reveal the gender differences in the adults and various studies account that women are more depressed in general than men.

One of the major causes of the prevalence of depression among the adults, both men and women, is the existence of psychosocial factors. The psychosocial factors are often confused with the psychological factors (Murakumi, 2002). The psychological factors deal with the mental behavior of person and intra-psychic factors such as cognitive processes, self esteem, self efficacy, perception of self, judgments, expectations and the like. The psychosocial factors, on the other hand, include the mental behavior of society as a whole. It includes the interpersonal relations of the person within the society such as parents, friends and family or everything related with the environment and surrounding or ...