| Health / Health News |
Depression - men far more at risk than women in deprived areas
Depression is a major cause of disability around the world, and if left untreated, can lead to substance abuse, anxiety and suicide.
Depression. Photo: Jonathan Rados/Unsplash
Major depressive disorder is a particular form of the condition which affects many people, potentially causing loss of pleasure in activities that once used to bring joy. It can also lead to feelings of worthlessness, imbalances such as oversleeping or insomnia, and trigger thoughts of suicide.
This is the condition that researchers examined during this new study, which showed that living in a deprived area can lead to major depressive disorder in men, but not in women.
There are certain factors which can place a person at increased risk for major depression. Being diagnosed with a serious chronic ailment, such as diabetes or cancer, now or in the past, can increase the risk for it. As can experiences of trauma, such as physical or sexual abuse, or being raised in a dysfunctional family in which there was a high degree of marital discord.
These, however, are all individual factors – or personal circumstances – which can negatively affect mental health. And most of the research on depression has indeed focused on such personal factors.
But there are characteristics beyond the level of the individual – such as attributes of the communities in which we live – that can also have a profound effect on mental well-being.
Previous studies have shown that living in communities characterised as deprived can lead residents of those areas to rate their health as suboptimal and experience early death.
Through this study, researchers wanted to know if living in a deprived area can also influence the mental health of men and women – even after accounting for personal circumstances. That is, even after you take people’s socioeconomic status into account (in this study’s case, education and social class), does a person’s residential environment still affect their mental health?
This study showed that living in a deprived area does affect mental health – at least in men. In fact, men living in the most deprived areas were 51% more likely to experience depression than those living in areas that were not deprived. Interestingly, the results did not reach statistical significance in women.
A recent study investigating depression risks for men and women indicated that men are more affected by “failures at key instrumental tasks, such as expected work achievements and failures to provide adequately for the family”.
Research shows that men seem to be more sensitive to certain stressors in their environment compared to women, such as those related to work and finances. Women’s depression levels, on the other hand, are more influenced by stressors stemming from relationships and the social networks they are embedded in.
Factors such as low parental warmth and low marital satisfaction, for example, can really affect women’s mental health.
While women are at a lower risk of depression than men in deprived areas, other research shows that they are more likely to experience anxiety. Further work is needed on the effect of the residential environment on mental health from a gender perspective.
High numbers of people are living in deprivation around the world and depression is a leading cause of disability on a global scale. Knowing how men and women are affected by the hardship of living in deprivation can help focus mental health treatment. (University of Cambridge)
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