This research describes depression among women in the middle years.
Depression is an illness like kidney or heart disease. It is a mental state in which grief or anxiety or "agonized feelings" predominate. In Hippocrates time, the fourth century B.C., it was known as melancholia, literally "depression," a despondent condition thought to be one of the four temperaments of man (Cammer, 1969, p. 16). Today, we view depression as a product of mental, physical and social forces, which adversely change a person's behavior, feeling state and thoughts.
Physically, depression may include such symptoms as nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, headaches, stomachaches, or abnormal neural functions. In extremity, it can result in a nervous breakdown or psychotic break. Under most conditions, it is experienced as severe anxiety, exhaustion, tensional energy, and stress. It often represents fear and anger buried under layers of maladaptive behavior.
Depression in women comes from many sources. One traditional source is dissatisfaction with approaching old age. By middle age, the woman reaches menopause. She can no longer bear children. If her identity was bound up with child-rearing, she may no longer feel valued as a human being, and a crisis may ensue (Lee and Casebier, 1971, 108).
Since an older generation viewed sexuality as "work and duty," (Lee and Casebier, p. 125) often repressing sensory feelings or "libido," the middle aged women sometimes becomes sexually unresponsive, even frigid. Often, couples in their middle years are plagued by loss of sexual fulfillment combined with loss of the status and ability to produce children, as they could in their youth. So, a traditional woman often experiences this loss as depression.
Another dimension of the problem is that her husband in middle years may switch careers or achieve success, for example in an executive or managerial position. He may withdraw into his occupation, e...