Women and Depression
By Dr. Mark Anderson
Samantha is a 27-year-old mother of two young children. She and her husband are proud parents of a three-year-old boy and a six-month-old infant daughter. She works part-time. Following the birth of her daughter, she has not felt quite right. As of the last two months she has felt overwhelmed, unmotivated, distant and empty, and sad. Her sleep has been fitful often taking one to two hours to initiate sleep and awaking often during the night. Needless to say she is quite tired, even exhausted during the day. Perhaps most concerning to Samantha is her edginess and irritability with her children and husband. She does not understand what is happening to her, but maintains that she cannot control the thoughts and feelings.
Julie is a 35-year-old woman. She and her husband have no children and both are very involved in careers. As of last year, their marriage has been increasingly conflicted. Julia cannot recall feeling happy in her adult life. Instead, she has felt most often a little sad, uptight, with difficult sleeping patterns and mild fatigue. Chronic headaches have been present for several years. Within the last six months most of the above problems have worsened. She has also felt increasingly unmotivated in regards to her career and experiences general disinterest in things that used to be of interest to her. Having developed a good support system, she now prefers to be alone. She wonders what is wrong. She has embarked on a program of exercise and has also started taking over-the-counter sleeping pills.
Kris is in her mid fifties. Following a prolonged bout of cancer, her husband passed away about one and a half years ago. According to friends, their marriage had been a “match made in heaven.” Kris still misses her husband a great deal. She believed that the grief would subside after awhile. However, the grief does not seem to diminish and indeed she has a sense that she is “losing control.” She sleeps about ten hours a night but always feels tired. Her appetite has decreased significantly. She doesn’t seem to care about getting together with friends anymore. She furthermore feels poorly motivated and has trouble concentrating in addition to having become quite forgetful. She suffers from frequent nausea. Crying spells seem endless and she occasionally believes life may not be worth it. She is frustrated, feels “stuck in her grief” and feels hopeless.
The above three situations illustrate an increasingly frequent illness among women of all ages: depression. Women today have a one in four chance of experiencing a depressive episode over their lifetime. At any point in time, between 8 and 10 percent of adult women are experiencing depression. As shown above, causes vary greatly. Chronic and persistent stressors such as constant marital conflict sometimes cause depression, while other depressions result from trauma or hormonal influences. At times, depression simply seems to appear for no reason. The average length of intense depression (major depression) is one year whereas a more mild depression (dysthymia) lasts on the average of four and a half years.
Because depression is a term also used to describe a temporary mood state, it is important to understand that depression as an illness differs from the mood state. Usual symptoms of depression include sleep and appetite disturbance, headaches and/or stomach distress, sad and irritable mood, social withdrawal, loss of interest, loss of motivation, fatigue, concentration/memory problems, thoughts of being hopeless, helpless and/or worthless, crying spells and thoughts of death.
If a person has several (but not necessarily all) of the above, and these signs have lasted for at least two weeks, then he/she probably are experiencing a depressive episode. That’s the bad news. The good news is that depression is very responsive to treatment. Individuals are urged to contact their physician and/or a mental health professional. With treatment, the symptoms can be relieved in a relatively brief period of time followed by a return to normal functioning once again.
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