ABSTRACT
Depression is the most common cause of distress and ill-health in women. At the age of 16 girls are three times as likely to attempt suicide as boys, and later about one-third of young women aged between 16 and 35 years old become seriously depressed. Throughout the developed world, with the exception only of Finland and Norway, women are twice as likely to become depressed as men. Working-class women with a child under 6 years of age are, as a group, highly at risk of developing depression; young women who come from the most deprived childhood backgrounds are eight times more likely to suffer depression than young men from privileged backgrounds. Women consult general practitioners for mental-health problems more frequently than men, and are generally more likely to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Given this gloomy picture, the disinterested observer may well wonder why there has been so little research directed to elucidating the causes of depression in women, and – in view of its prevalence in women with young children – so little concern with the implications of depressed motherhood for normal healthy child development.
