>Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high
Separate issue, I know. But it could be much lower because men/boys often refuse to report such feelings, out of a fear of being perceived as weak/having been taught that "that's not what men do".
Self-reported data can always be a little flakey, especially on sensitive topics like this.
Men experience significantly lower rates of most common mental disorders; that gap is wider in younger people, appears to be widening over time and persists after controlling for confounding variables. Men are more likely to die by suicide, but they're drastically less likely to attempt suicide; the discrepancy is accounted for by men choosing more lethal means.
There is simply no evidence to support the idea that women are better at coping with psychological distress, or that men would benefit from adopting stereotypically female coping strategies.
> while women have lower mortality rates throughout their life, they also often have higher rates of physical illness, more disability days, more doctor visits, and hospital stays than men do
I wonder how much is this due to the fact that women are more ill or the fact that men don't go to the doctor even if they have to.
> The picture is especially concerning for men, whose life expectancy is now 73.2 years, compared with women’s 79.1. This 5.9 year gap is the widest between the two genders since 1996.
> […]
> “The opioid epidemic, mental health, and chronic metabolic disease are certainly front and center in the data that we see here, explaining why there’s this widening life expectancy gap by gender, as well as the overall drop in life expectancy,” said Yan. Men have higher mortality rates from all three conditions compared to women.
> Men are suseptible to depression, but women especially so post-partum
Depression is actually much more prevalent in women, in general, need t just post-partum[0]. I've linked a single reference, but there really is a lot of evidence here (although I think men probably hide it more frequently than women, but that's just my unscientific opinion!).
Most sex differentiated medical stories which pop up in my feed tend to be about drug interactions in women being misunderstood because of the overtesting of males. That mental illness is mis-characterised in men, speaks to me of two things:
1) we haven't had a large enough war to produce the volume of war psychosis outcomes which correct for this and
2) women are tragically over-represented in all forms of mental illness profiles, which may relate to their real condition but also may relate to distortions in societal views of women and mental illness.
That’s not a counterpoint. It’s a possible upside, but these things don’t net out across patients.
> Also, women generally have a larger friend group than men and their friends are more encouraged to stage interventions if their lives are spinning out of control than men.
This is a nonsense argument even if the premise may be true. This, in no way, makes the harm ok.
Makes sense. Consistent with a greater prevalence of men than women at both of society's extremes. Evolutionary strategy suggests taking higher-risk paths for male phenotypes than female phenotypes.
That being the case, the point remains that a dismissive adult is much more likely to get in the way of a teenager from getting a diagnosis than that of another adult. Furthermore, the fact that doctors are more likely to take men seriously than they do women would explain why the increase in diagnoses is so much higher in male adults than in female adults, even though the base rate of women suffering from mental health issues is actually the same as that of men.
Obviously, the part in italics is fiction. It is referring to the alternate world I mentioned in my comment above where the effect was the the opposite of what we're seeing (with the added extra of adult men appearing to be seeing a greater increase than adult women) and how it's so easy to come up with post-hoc explanations using what seem like reasonable and factual premises.
> men having shorter lifespans than women. It seems like a biological rather than a social thing
There is plenty of signs from research that point it towards a social thing and not biological.
1# Society values men for their ability to earn money. Women are valued for their social network. Successful aging is correlated to having a strong social network since it reduces stress.
2# Dating success for men is correlated to successful risk taking in maximizing earning potential. For women it is correlated to maximize personal health.
3# Studies on the health care system has shown to tendency to underdiagnose health issues for men while the opposite for women. Suicide is still the primary cause of death for men until around age 60.
Given that women have to bear an utter majority of the workload summarized as "care work", anything from raising children over household chores to caring for elderly relatives, on top of female-specific health issues like painful periods or endometriosis (10% of women [1], and that is before under-diagnosis or late diagnosis comes into play [2]), it makes sense that a lot of women end up with depression-related symptoms. Other societal factors that increase load on women (like the drug crisis, absent fathers, rampant sexism and misogyny in society, the recent barrage of threats to womens' lives and reproductive health) also come as an additional risk factor.
Additionally, as women have entered the work force over the last decades for a number of reasons, it also makes sense they now have rising rates of work-related mental health issues like burnout and depression.
And what also must not be forgotten is a severe under-diagnosis for mental health in men. Barely half the men that self-report symptoms of depression or other mental health issues actually seek out help [3], my personal guess is that this is to a large degree because the historic image of "male-ness" outright ignores mental health issues and labels men that seek help for these as "weak", which has been shown for PTSD in var veterans. Women have it "easier" from social expectations, which may help to hide the fact that, were men equally invested in their mental health, they'd end up at the same ratio of depression!
Because that was the cohort studied, not because the opposite is true for men only. As it says in the article previous studies indicate the effects may be even greater for men.
Men are diagnosed significantly lower, not experience.
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