For every male diagnosed as suffering from depression there are two to six females. The reasons for this incidence are examined by looking at diagnostic practices, theories of depression, their validity and applicability to women, and new work which both confirms the high incidence of depression and points to new understanding.
Systems of classification show a striking lack of conceptual clarity. Types of depression are distinguished on the basis of such variables as mood, activity level, severity, presumed genetic or non-genetic origin, and contact with reality. Although ill-defined and misunderstood, nevertheless depression is no myth. Genetic, endocrine, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioural and social theories of depression all seek to explain the behaviour of the depressed person.
Notwithstanding the relevance, or partial relevance, of some of these theories, there is a major pitfall. The difficulty is typically formulated as a dysfunction of the individual woman, and it is envisaged that treatment should effect some change on her part. The need to change her environment is rarely addressed, her husband seldom included except as a help and support to her, and she is almost never apprised of the role of social structures and her own socialization in creating and perpetuating her distress. New work underscores the difficulties of women's daily experience and its connection to depression. Non-psychiatric women writers, addressing a general audience, have given the best description of women's daily lives and the paths to resentment, misery, frustration, boredom, and fatigue.
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