9% of women in The Netherlands. The US is apparently experiencing 25%? Maybe I missed something?
Good point. A survey by a pharma company about how many women “feel depressed and take meds” will skew higher than actual cases of clinial depression.
OTOH, actual diagnoses of clinial depression will skew too low, because of several different barriers to getting diagnosed in the first place:
A person who suffers from severe depression must overcome
personal (feeling too lethargic to get out of bed, let alone get help; my problems are not severe enough compared to African children)
social (how will people react if they know I’m depressed? Why can’t I just be stronger, insted of being weak/ broken to need treatment? My pastor says mental problems don’t exist or go away if we pray harder. Etc)
practical (I am currently not insured/ my insurance doesn’t cover mental health treatment/ in my area there is no mental health provider working with my insurance; the waiting list for mental health treatment in my area is 3 months long; If I do get diagnosed, the diagnosis will follow me for the rest of my life, which will hidner my chances of getting a job).
hurdles in order to be officially diagnosed, and get treatment.
Although National (International) Day/ Week /Month for Awareness is in October Mental Illness Awareness Week - Wikipedia and Mental Health Awareness Month - Wikipedia the WHO did start a week this year in April about Depression http://www.who.int/campaigns/world-health-day/2017/en/ giving it as leading cause worldwide for ill health and disability. So it’s not only one culture.
Let me wiki that for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmugMug
Bottom line: yet another photo sharing site.
First, 9% of Dutch women is more than zero, ie “Dutch women don’t get depressed”.
Second, the alleged 25% figure for U.S. women was from a Medco pharmacy benefits report. It was not a scientific study of actual depression rates of women in the US.
This study shows as of 2015, about 8.5% of U.S. women had at least one major depressive episode the past year: Major Depression - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
So by that study, Dutch women at 9% are actually more depressed than U.S. women at 8.5%.
This shows why it’s misleading to pluck a figure from a document, not understand the basis for that, then start making assumptions about causes and remedies.
Agreed. Here’s an interesting follow-on question about any of these kin ds of stats.
If, e.g., this year 8% of women have a clinical diagnosis of depression, what is the lifetime rate? IOW, what are the odds any single random woman will have that diagnosis over her life?
Whatever the number is, it’s bigger than 8%. And this would be true for almost any factor we care to name, from medical diagnoses to car ownership.
Hypothetically, if there is some medical condition that 50% of women are diagnosed with at some point in their life, is that a data point about the natural human condition or an indictment of a social or environmental system spreading its disease-ful consequences far and wide? And how might one tell these cases apart?
Good questions to which I have no answers.
Well, you don’t even know that. It could be the same 8% getting depressed every year. Or maybe it’s never the same women, so everybody gets depressed sooner or later.
And, of course, 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
Being told you’re broken if you don’t happen to have kids is, on the other hand, quite traditional.
DSM-6 will probably include labels for pre-morbid behavioural symptoms that will develop into mental illness without drug intervention. “You’re not mentally ill yet … but unless you take this medication you may well become so.”
The same goes for physical diseases too: “Your blood pressure is too high, better take Beta blockers” (changing your Lifestyle is good, but only knocks down 10 Points. Yes, 20 years ago blood pressure was much higher, but we changed it).
Yes, there is a Problem with pharma companies influencing doctors. Both directly - Sponsoring vacations disguised as conferences, or giving free samples - and indirectly by not reporting studies with bad results (which the FDA and other govt. bodies are trying to Change).
But there is another side, a legitimate reason for doctors to Change their recommendations and Guidelines and brackets for which values are healthy* - doctors in General want their patients to stay healthy. Health is a complex Thing, partly Lifestyle, partly genetics, and most behaviours take decades to Show. Or you look in the wrong place (People with ulcers have bacteria, so it’s not stress! - turns out to be more complicated… A new theory is that depressioin in some - not all - patients may be related to low-level Inflammation, not low Serotonin Levels.)
So doctors can either use the newest study suggesting a link between drug A or behaviour of Italian diet and outcome X and try to convince their patients that this might be good - and then wait 20 years as to the outcome.
Or they recruit 4 000 volunteers for 20 years to test first, and only then do recommendations, while a large number of patients might have profited from knowing right now. Or maybe the side effects are larger than the benefits.
Nobody knows. Scientists can do cold-blooded studies that take time. Doctors want to help their patients now. Using new results might Profit a large number of patients, or harm a large number, or not do anything useful, but it’s very hard to wait for results if you know your patients now.
Take beta blockers- they do have side effects. But high blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. So do you as doctor/ Patient risk the side effects or the stroke?
- The other other reasons - that if the doctor can Show he treated the values of blood pressure, Na in blood etc., he can’t be sued for not doing the right Thing, although maybe it would be better to look at each Patient “are you having symptoms? No? Then I don’t Need to treat you”.
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all here. Crafter_Man’s post actually describes my experience to a T.
When I returned to work after having my baby girl, I cried every day. Every single day. I was coming apart at the seams. I was devastated to go back to my job (which I had previously found fulfilling) and found I was too tired to be the mother I wanted to be once I got home.
I absolutely felt an inner battle with the concept of feminism as I understood it then (though not as I would define it now) – I felt that I was ungrateful and weak that despite my years of education and experience all I wanted was to be at home with my baby, and incompetent that I was unable to balance working outside of the home with the way I wanted to parent and maintain my household. Giving up the job would have felt shameful to me, plus I felt it was expected of me to work, and it also would have left us in a financial place that doesn’t work the way it used to – at least to my perspective, when single-income families were the norm, maintaining a middle-class lifestyle was more viable than it is on a single income now.
So my options were to abandon the career I had put time, money, and effort into building and stay home feeling like a failure and struggling to pay the bills, or to continue working and feel like a failure because I was crying in the bathroom during every coffee break and coming home exhausted to a messy house and a baby who had spent the whole day with someone other than me. The thought of both options caused me a huge amount of stress, and I do wish I hadn’t felt such pressure to be a “feminist” (again, not how I would define it now, but also a common enough confusion).
I’m glad you found the balance that worked for you, but please don’t be so quick to assume that the concept laid out by Crafter_Man is “inside out and backwards” - it was exactly that kind of insistence by many of the working moms I knew that made me utterly ashamed to confess that I felt that way.
Actually, if you look at actual traditional families in history (or in places of the world that are still agrarian), staying home meant working in the farm or fields and raising the children was low status work foisted off to older siblings or the elderly. A farmer’s wife (or more likely daughter-in-law) in the agrarian world who insisted on staying around in the house to just tend to a baby would be considered a lazy piece of shit and would probably find herself soon divorced (if she’s lucky, laziness was considered a justified reason for beating a daughter-in-law traditionally).
I’m sorry to hear that it was so difficult for you. The usual definition of feminism that I like best because it makes most sense is “Feminism is the liberation of men and women from rigid, old-fashioned gender norms.” Or: men are free to work or stay at home. Women are free to work or stay at home. The problem was not that women didn’t “work” (they always worked, they just didn’t get paid for housework and raising kids), it’s that they were forbidden to work without permission from their husband (up to the 1960s/70s, depending on which country), that they were not protected against harrassment in workplace, that they still don’t get the same wage.
And society’s expectation that the mark of a good mother is juggling 5 things at the same time is harmful both to mothers and children (in fact to the whole family) - because the whole organization only works as long as the kids act like little robots. Which is the opposite of what children are. One tantrum by the 5 year old, and the morning routine is 30 min. out of whack, delaying the whole day. But one tantrum is completly normal for a toddler/ kindergarten kid.
One kid gets a cold, and all plans fall apart. But kids get colds all the time, their immune system is still developing.
So society needs to accept the needs of human beings as first priority, instead of putting the interests of managers and companies to squeeze every minute of productivity from their employees (work drones).
Paid maternity/ paternity leave for up to 2 years would be a good start, for example.