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CHAPTER 13

Mental Health

I

n 2005, 118 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written, making antide-

pressants the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States (Cohen, 2007).

In 10 years (1996 to 2005), the use of antidepressants doubled; 10% of Americans

now take antidepressants (Olfson & Marcus, 2009). And, women are twice as likely as

men to use antidepressants (National Center for Health Statistics, 2009b).

Mental health, in particular depression, is clearly an important problem in our

country. Depression is not only related to mortality (Collins, Glei, & Goldman, 2009;

Ryan et al., 2008) as well as specific diseases (e.g., heart disease; Haukkala et al., 2009)

and risk factors for disease (Toker, Shirom, & Melamed, 2008), but is an important

problem in and of itself. Some important public figures have brought attention to men-

tal health problems, with the effect of reducing their stigma and permitting more people

to seek help for them. Richard Dreyfuss and Mel Gibson have bipolar disorder, and

each has appeared in a documentary about the disorder. Great Britain’s Princess Diana

acknowledged depression and an eating disorder before her death. Tina Turner (1986)

admitted in her autobiography that she tried to kill herself with an overdose of Valium.

Mental health problems afflict women and men somewhat differently. Substantial evi-

dence indicates that women are more likely than men to suffer from depression and to

have an eating disorder, whereas men are more likely than women to commit suicide.

I begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence for sex differences in depression. There

seems to be a large and pervasive sex difference in depression, such that women suffer

more depression than men. Critics, however, argue that definitional and methodological

problems make this difference less clear. Thus, I examine the extent to which methodologi-

cal artifacts can account for this difference. The rest of the discussion is devoted to the-

oretical explanations for the sex difference in depression. These theories have biological,

psychological, social, and cultural underpinnings. No one theory can completely account

for women being more depressed than men. It is most likely a combination of theories

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