Real Men, Real Depression?
Q: Six million American men will be
diagnosed with depression this year. But millions more suffer silently,
unaware that their problem has a name or unwilling to seek treatment.
The result is a hidden epidemic of despair that is destroying marriages,
disrupting careers, filling jail cells, clogging emergency rooms and costing
society billions of dollars in lost productivity and medical bills
A:In a confessional culture in which Americans
are increasingly obsessed with their health, it may seem clichidmen are
from Mars, women from Venus, and all thatto say that men tend not to take
care of themselves and are reluctant to own up to mental illness. But the
facts suggest that, well, men tend not to take care of themselves and are
reluctant to own up to mental illness. Although depression is emotionally
crippling and has numerous medical implicationssome of them deadlymany men
fail to recognize the symptoms. Instead of talking about their feelings, men
may mask them with alcohol, drug abuse, gambling, anger or by becoming
workaholics. And even when they do realize they have a problem, men often
view asking for help as an admission of weakness, a betrayal of their male
identities.
If modern psychologists were slow to understand how men's emotions affect
their behaviors, it's only because their predecessors long ago decided that
having a uterus was the main risk factor for mental illness. During the last
two centuries, depression was largely viewed as a female problem, an
outgrowth of hormonal fluctuations stemming from puberty, childbirth and
menopause. Even the most skilled psychologists and psychiatrists missed
their male patients' mood disorders, believing that depressed men, like
depressed women, would talk openly about feeling blue. "I misdiagnosed male
depression for years and years," says