If you agree that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, well, it seems that common Martian mental problems may differ from Venusians.
From our previous (light) discussion on how fictional characters in Watchmen and Batman may indicate various personality disorders and traits, notes from the World Health Organization indicate that even amongst Men and Women there are unique predispositions:
Some of the findings are intuitively easy to accept, such as alcoholism in men:
The lifetime prevalence rate for alcohol dependence, another common disorder, is more than twice as high in men than women. In developed countries, approximately 1 in 5 men and 1 in 12 women develop alcohol dependence during their lives.
And post-traumatic stress from sexual violence in women:
The high prevalence of sexual violence to which women are exposed and the correspondingly high rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following such violence, renders women the largest single group of people affected by this disorder.
Why would this be the case? WHO cites primarily risk factors differ between the sexes because of environmental factors:
Why Gender?
Gender is a critical determinant of mental health and mental illness. The morbidity associated with mental illness has received substantially more attention than the gender specific determinants and mechanisms that promote and protect mental health and foster resilience to stress and adversity.
Gender determines the differential power and control men and women have over the socioeconomic determinants of their mental health and lives, their social position, status and treatment in society and their susceptibility and exposure to specific mental health risks.
Gender differences occur particularly in the rates of common mental disorders – depression, anxiety and somatic complaints. These disorders, in which women predominate, affect approximately 1 in 3 people in the community and constitute a serious public health problem.
The other factors WHO cites are also gender bias or discrimination in the treatment of mental illness between the sexes:
Gender bias
Gender bias occurs in the treatment of psychological disorders. Doctors are more likely to diagnose depression in women compared with men, even when they have similar scores on standardized measures of depression or present with indentical symptoms.
Female gender is a significant predictor of being prescribed mood altering psychotropic drugs.
Gender differences exist in patterns of help seeking for psychological disorder. Women are more likely to seek help from and disclose mental health problems to their primary health care physician while men are more likely to seek specialist mental health care and are the principal users of inpatient care.
Men are more likely than women to disclose problems with alcohol use to their health care provider.
Gender stereotypes regarding proneness to emotional problems in women and alcohol problems in men, appear to reinforce social stigma and constrain help seeking along stereotypical lines. They are a barrier to the accurate identification and treatment of psychological disorder.
Read the rest of this interesting article here.
[...] This blog also covered NPD and other personality disorders as part of the DSM-IV list as well as in popular fiction like Watchmen. A recent article from the WHO also indicated that personality disorders may be gender-biased. [...]