Women and Depression: Worldwide Epidemic

Paper Summary:

This paper outlines the historic association between women and depression and highlights society's proclivity to believe women are more susceptible to mental illness due to their hormones. It argues, however, that women are more likely than men to experience depression and mental illness due to their social and political stance within society; that is, women are more likely to be depressed because, in a patriarchal society, they have "more to be depressed about". It covers physical and sexual violence, gendered economics, family 'responsibilities' of women, and the gendered implications of female embodiment.

Outline
Women and Mental Illness: From Hysteria to Depression
The View from the Bottom Rung of the Gender Hierarchy
Physical and Sexual Violence
Cultural Implications of Female Embodiment on Economic (In)Dependence
Family Caring Responsibilities
Damned if They Do and Damned if They Don?t: the Feminine Gender Role

From the Paper:

"The connection between women and mental illness is a long and, in many ways, inseparable one. Historically, in our cultural myths, it is women who are "mad" or drive men to "madness" "spinsters, crones, and witches are all depicted as slightly mad, while the Furies and the oceanic Sirens are supposed harbingers of madness. Let us not forget either that it was the first woman, Eve, who brought both literal and symbolic madness, in the form of disharmony and evil, to "man-kind." The extensive medical history between women and mental illness begins in recorded history, not surprisingly, as intricately bound up with that which defines them as "other" their biology. Four thousand years ago the Egyptian "Kahun Papyrus" associated female distress with the "dislocation... of the uterus." Fifteen hundred years later, Hippocrates described the female disease "hysteron" caused by an organic imbalance of the womb, and thus the female "hysteric" was born. By the seventeenth century C.E., dominant medical discourse had relocated the site of women's mental illness from the womb to the brain, and hysteria became a disease of the mind."

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