Mental health issues more prevalent in women as 7% are diagnosed with depression

Women suffer more mental health issues compared to men, especially depression and anxiety. Data shows that 7.1% of women have been diagnosed with depression, double that of men’s metric (3.5%), according to figures registered from July 2019 to 2020 by the Spanish Institute of Statistics (INE).

"Statistics show that women have more mental health issues, especially affective disorders such as depression or anxiety," Vall d’Hebron hospital psychiatrist Gemma Parramon said to the Catalan News Agency (ACN). 

There are several reasons behind the gap between these metrics. The vast majority of them are psychosocial factors but there are also gender-led stereotypes. 

"Until 2014, one of the adjectives for ‘feminine’ in Spain’s Royal Language Academy dictionary was ‘weak’, while ‘masculine’ had ‘energetic’ as a synonym," Parramon pointed out. 

Girls are also more self-demanding according to 'Science' magazine back in 2017. This characteristic makes them live in more stressful situations, as the study says that at the age of 6, girls often believe boys are smarter than them. 

Precarious work

Despite the progress made in the past decades, the world of work still has stark inequalities between men and women. The gender pay gap in Catalonia was 20.6% in 2019, according to data published last month. This means that, on average, women in Catalonia earned €500 less than men per month.

The gender pay gap is added to the precariousness of work that women have compared to men, as well as less visible jobs, as in most cases, women stay at home taking care of children and doing other household responsibilities. 

"If a woman does not take care of the family, she will be criticized and the feeling of guilt appears.” This is another one of the reasons why women have higher mental health issues compared to men, psychiatrist Parramon said. 

"All these reasons add up. It could be that a woman does not generate any disorder as she can have some strategies, but everything is an obstacle course, and one day or another, you end up stumbling," she added.

Lack of gender-focused health research

Having a gender-focused diagnosis in health assistance, research, and education is key for women, Parramon told ACN. 

"The way men and women get sick is different. The scientific and medical community is fully aware," she said. "There is a lack of knowledge on how women get sick. We have to investigate more, and have more questions to solve them," added.  

All medicines are mainly based on a caucasian male, and all the other guesses have been "extracted" from that.  

One of the examples showing how men and women have different health systems is a 2019 study led by Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital that showed that women's heart attack mortality rate (18%) was twice as high as men's. Experts believe one of the reasons is that women would associate the symptoms with anxiety or other diseases and would not go to a hospital.