Do Women Get More Depressed Than Men?

Thursday April 26, 2001 6:05 PM ET
Do Women Get More Depressed Than Men?

By Keith Mulvihill

NEW YORK (Reuter Health) - Despite the fact that depression is more common among women than men, women are not more sensitive to the everyday stresses that come their way, according to results of a study.

Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler and colleagues at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond studied various aspects of depression among more than 5,000 sets of twins. Their findings are published in the April issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The participants, who were interviewed four times over a 10-year period, were asked to identify all of the various stressful life events that contributed to feelings of depression, as well as how often they experienced depression.

It is a fact that women become depressed more frequently than men and that stressful life events are the single most important factor contributing to depression for both men and women, Kendler explained in an interview with Reuter Health.

He and his colleagues sought to determine whether there were gender differences in the frequency of stressful life events, and if women were more sensitive to stressful life events than men.

The results showed that men have the same number of stressful events as women, but these stressful events are different.

Men were more likely to succumb to depression due to stressful life events relating to their jobs, or to divorce or separation. Women were more likely to get depressed about problems with close friends.

``Women are not exposed to more stressful life events than men, and they are not more sensitive to becoming depressed than men,'' Kendler told Reuter Health.

``So we have to look someplace else to understand the sex difference regarding depression between men and women...such as biology, culture and genetics,'' he added.

SOURCE: American Journal of Psychiatry 2001;158:587-593.