A recent article in the Daily News highlighted how depression in men may be underdiagnosed because symptoms can look different than those in women. The article referenced a study in JAMA Psychiatry that reported that when doctors include ‘non-traditional’ symtoms like anger, aggression and sleep problems, about one-third of men meet the criteria for depression – the same as women. Rather than outward sadness, depressed men may be more likely to show symptoms like irritability, distraction and self-destruction.
In psychotherapist Terrence Real’s book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, he states that twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced him that there are two forms of depression: “overt” and “covert.” Feeling the stigma of depression’s unmanliness, he says, “many men hide their condition not only from family and friends but even from themselves. Attempts to escape depression fuel many of the problems we think of as typically male – difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage. By directing their pain outward, depressed men hurt the people they love, and, most tragically, pass their condition on to their children.”
He goes on to say that each year millions of men and women fall prey to depression while less than one in five get help. In recent years, the silence surrounding depression in women has begun to lift, but only now has Real exposed a virtual epidemic of the disorder in men.
If you know a male with the “non-traditional” symptoms of depression (anger, self-destruction, self-distractions and irritability), you should encourage him to seek treatment.
