Causes For Depression: 3 Secret Reasons Why Women Are More Depressed?

There are 3 secret reasons found in depressed women that are the causes for depression in so many women. Studies in the twenties century have shown that more women than men are affected by depression. The current ratio is 2 to 1. You may ask yourself why is this? First of all, depression developed into the number one mental health issue of our modern times irrespective of gender. Compared to eighty years ago, there is a much earlier onset of depression. We get depressed at a much younger age than our forefathers.

Causes for depression: Reasons why women may be more depressed

• Women are more willing to seek help, and go to therapy, so they show up more in the statistics.
• Women talk more willingly about their problems.
• Women have worse jobs than men and are paid less.
• Women have more depression because of biological differences.
• Women are more depressed because of genetic differences.
• Women feel more depressed because of sex-role pressure.

After careful scrutiny, none of these reasons hold true, and cannot be used to explain why women are so much more affected by depression than men.

Three plausible explanations of the causes for depression in women

1. The first is learned helplessness. Our society gives women enough opportunities to experience helplessness over their whole lives. It starts with being ignored in the birth family, and rather trained for passivity and dependence. Her future role is seen as wife and mother. When she ventures out into the world of work, her achievements are given less credit. In meeting she gets more bored nods, and when in a position of power, she is seen out of place. Learned helplessness permeates everything what is essentially female, and leads irrevocably into women being depressed.

2. The second is rumination. While men act, women think. She broods, and relives the event over and over again. Men rather tend to do something such as getting drunk, bashing somebody up, or getting otherwise distracted without being bothered to think through what went wrong. As depression is also a disorder of thought patterns, rumination feeds right into it.

3. The third is the pursuit of thinness. 95 per cent fail to keep the extra pounds from coming back. As a result of this failure and frequent reminders that "you are too fat" will depress you. When you succeed to stay thin, you may be prone to anorexia. Starving constantly, you may suffer one of the major side effects of starvation that is depression. Cultures that don't persue the ideal of thinness, don't have more women depressed than men.

Learned helplessness, rumination, and the ideal of thinness can be put forward as causes for depression in Western women. These can all be changed, though. We need to change society, and media's obsession with the thinness ideal. We need to change the way we bring up girls, so they can escape the indoctrination into helplessness, and in therapy we need to address rumination to help women to use more constructive ways to overcome issues.

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