Depression and Older Women
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Depression disproportionately strikes women and older persons. Hence, older women constitute one of the populations most strongly affected by depression. The psychology of depression has historically received considerable attention, particularly as a disorder with an impact on women. A number of factors identify the depression phenomenon as arising as much from social influences as from the structure of individual emotional lives. At the same time, the results of medical research and medical treatment suggest a physiological basis for many, if not most, of the symptoms of depression. Treatments for depression try, in some instances, to address those physiological factors. In other instances, treatments attempt to address the complex of cognitive, behavioral and social factors that may underlie depression. It may be that depression as a recognizable disorder reflects the interaction of several elements in ways that at least partially explain its prevalance among older women. The incidence of depression is markedly higher among females than among males. Studies vary in the actual numbers they yield, but women across age groups are apparently about two times more likely than males to suffer from depression (Brown & Harris, 1978). Because almost every study of depression conducted in industrialized nations reveals a substantial sex difference in depression, researchers believe that there actually is a difference in the population and not some widespread flaw in
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oing through the parallel process of creating a definition of depression consistent with psychodynamic theory. Freud, originally a neurologist, had presented a neurological explanation of depression in 1897, but transformed his concepts into a psychological theory in 1917 with the publication of Mourning and Melancholia (Goldberg, 1975). As the title of the book suggests, compared mourning, a state of actual loss, with melancholia, a withdrawal in response to a loss of self regard. Both states involve depressive symptoms, a feeling of sadness, although only the melancholia is pathological. Melancholia as a pathological disorder involves dwelling upon the loss of a narcissistic object, which results in a state of depression. From a purely Freudian point of view, "Melancholia is a pathological state involving narcissistic blows to the ego experienced as losses and involving more wholesale or traumatic internalization of the offending object" (Goldberg, 1975, p.128).
Karl Abraham elaborated on the original Freudian conception, adding emphasis to the relation between depression and "oral libido" (Goldberg, 1975; Mahendra, 1987). Abraham believed that some individuals, fixated at the oral level, manifest excessive oral nee
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 7669
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)
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