Depression

Although psychiatric research appeared to be more scientific, certain unquestioned research practices: “First, pharmaceutical companies by this time period had begun a practice of designing their own research studies and analyzing their own statistics. Second, clinical trials on depressed patients more and more reinforced the circular definition of depression: depressed patients were those who could be shown to have responded to antidepressants. . . . In this time period, women continued to be clearly predominant in clinical samples that were by then selected based on symptoms. Investigators seemed to expect that they would have greater numbers of women in their samples and did not comment on this other than to say that women were more depressed than men. . . . By the 1970s, researchers generally stated that depression was more common in women than in men. . . . the supposition that depression was a disease of women had become entrenched to the point that studies that were done entirely on women were reported as studies on depression itself” (Hirshbein, 200-01, 202). . . . Estrogen became inextricably tied to the catecholamine hypothesis (despite a lack of convincing evidence) because of researchers’ assumptions that depression was something that tended to happen in women” (207). . . . the Beck Depression Inventory (1961) “did not address the issue of how men at that time (or in the future) might respond to a screening tool that asked multiple questions about feeling states” (211). . . . In Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) Study of early 80s, “the researchers used the presence of symptoms of depression in order to screen the population for untreated cases of depression. Researchers and epidemiologists assumed that it was valid to use criteria that had been determined in a hospitalized population in order to test the public for untreated or undiagnosed illness. Further, ECA and other researchers did not ask questions about what in particular was being measured with DSM criteria. Perhaps not surprisingly, when researchers used the criteria for depression (which had been developed in a patient population that was generally two-thirds or more women), they found that more women than men endorsed the symptoms (at a ratio o about two to one)” (213-214). . . . “Thus the connection between women and depression has been a closed circle: researchers have assumed that women are depressed more than men, which means that women have been preferentially diagnosed, treated, and theorized about, leading to further conclusions that women are depressed more than men” (215).