We should learn to be more disappointing. To displease others without feeling embarrassed or guilty when we put forward our reasons. Not to try to be satisfying, accommodating when it comes to affirming our desires. To stop being nice, altruistic, smiling, precise, understanding and emotionally controlled because otherwise, mmmh it doesn’t fit. Without absorbing an aggressive model that doesn’t work either. Because, apparently, our mental health may also depend on this. By learning to be more assertive and independent and less perfect, science says, we could defend ourselves from depression.
In particular, one study, later confirmed by other research, linked the propensity to please others and the inhibition of self-expression in relationships in an attempt to gain intimacy – learned behaviors rooted in gender norms – with an increase the risk of depression. Perfectionism, especially among the youngest, is also implicated. Basically, if you think about it, all those things normalized in our culture as femininity strengths can translate into significant psychological health costs.
Why it’s important to talk about emotional distress
by Brunella Gasperini
Is depression a woman?
But do women really suffer from depression more than men? All studies, worldwide, converge on the fact that the female population is at greater risk than the male population of incurring a mental disorder, in particular depression. Statistics show that depression, anxiety and eating disorders are prevalent and growing among women.
Even if today a multifactorial approach is favored to deal with depression, in the medical world there is still a certain predisposition to explain the greater female risk on biological grounds (genetic, hormonal and psycho-constitutional hypotheses). In a nineteenth-century vision, the female soul is still largely associated with the irrational sphere and explained on biological bases linked to what concerns the uterus and the reproductive cycle. Starting from the myth of hysteria we now arrive at premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy depression, postpartum depression, and the post-menopausal crisis. We women have always suffered this prejudice of being ultimately vulnerable, “cyclical”, unstable, incapable of maintaining a balance and therefore also unreliable and perhaps also unsuitable to hold positions of power and responsibility. An attitude that also leads to thinking that we cannot intervene effectively on female depression as it is intrinsic to our nature and, at the same time, underestimate psychiatric disorders among men.
When helping others too much hurts yourself: the super-caregiver syndrome
on Olga Noel Winderling
Depression: science is not wrong, but data can be misinterpreted
Yet there is some disagreement in the scientific world about whether women’s rate of depression is really that much higher than that of men. Numerous studies indicate rather that men and women experience depression to the same extent, although they express it differently. It turns out that women seek help more often, report their symptoms differently, and end up being diagnosed more. And that males instead tend to manifest symptoms such as anger, irritability, sleep disturbances and substance use, describing their state as stress rather than sadness. Even healthcare professionals fail to see him as depressed, but as withdrawn, angry or alcoholic. Coincidentally, however, if depression is measured with “male symptoms” across genders, it is males who report higher rates.
Prejudices in diagnosis, course and therapeutic choices
There is no consistent evidence that can explain gender differences in depressive disorders on the basis of biological factors alone. We can rather say that they exist stereotypes long-standing theories on gender differences are so deep-rooted that they have also made their way into mental health research and treatment. As highlighted by the study on depression in women by the psychologist Elvira Reale – head of the first assistance center for women victims of violence at the Cardarelli hospital in Naples and consultant of the Feminicide Commission in the Senate, author of the book Before the depression. Prevention manual dedicated to women (Franco Angeli Editore) – gender prejudices tend to overestimate biological-genetic risk factors and underestimate psychosocial and relational factors which instead play an important role. We can say that As women we have some everyday disadvantages that put us at greater risk of depression. The difficult conciliation between a plurality of roles, responsibilities and tasks linked to family and professional life, for example, a series of difficulties in the working world such as unemployment, having less stable, less fulfilling, less paid jobs and with fewer possibilities of advancement over men. The possibility of incurring discrimination, abuse and violence.
Prejudices about gender differences likely play a role in the diagnosis, course, and even treatment of this condition. Doctors are more likely to diagnose and prescribe antidepressants – as well as anxiolytics – to female patients. According to some investigations, the prescription is practically double for women.
world mental day
Depression and mental illnesses: Gen Z and Millennials are taught to talk about it without fear
by Giovanna Gallo
How to protect ourselves from depression
Depression is a complex condition, several proposals have been put forward to explain the presumed greater female susceptibility and none alone is enough. We women suffer a greater cultural risk due to a whole series of constraints and structural disadvantages that give us less social and economic power and expose us more to life events. In short, we have our holy reasons for feeling depressed, let’s see it as an adaptive responsean emotional loss in many cases necessary for our psychic life from which, if we get help, we can escape.
Science gives us a great help however, it makes us understand the importance of social and cultural processes and the influence of relationships on our mental health. Of the way we conceive our role in intimate relationships, of the risk we run when we use a sort of self-silencing of ourselves as a strategy to maintain intimacy and safety, of the damage we do to ourselves when we silence thoughts and feelings and postpone our needs.
Let’s think about all those times we say Yes even though we don’t want to, about when we place the needs of others over our own because we think they are more important, about when we do everything to adhere to what the world expects from us instead of asking ourselves what we really want. Let’s think back to how many times we don’t know how we are because we are focused on how others are doing, when we avoid talking for fear of arguing, to when we feel responsible for other people’s feelings, to how we manage to smile despite feeling agitated inside and to the difficulty of being ourselves in relationships.
Here, in these moments we are working against ourselves and our health. We’re gagging ourselves. We are preparing a comfortable ground to be invaded by sticky, dark and angry sensations which will slowly plunder enthusiasm, pleasure and lightness. Suppressing the expression of emotions, silencing oneself, is a regulation strategy closely linked to depression, studies say.
Our emotions are not something uncomfortable to silence. We should rather learn to see them as windows of intuition, use them to ask ourselves what our real needs are. We could try to reshape that idea of femininity that they have always proposed to us, overturn certain cultural expectations by giving freedom to what we feel, communicating what we want and establishing clear boundaries. This is how we can have stronger relationships and prevent inhibitions, guilt and addictions, precursors of possible depression.
#Society #pushes #women #feel #depressed #save #learn #disappoint
– 2024-04-04 08:25:19
