‘Healthy’ View of Woman and Depression
Here are some depressing statistics if you’re a woman:
Women today are estimated to suffer depression at rates 10 times higher than their grandmothers. Younger women are more at risk for depression than ever before, and it is now estimated that nearly one in three women age 18 to 24 is significantly depressed.
But Laguna Beach psychologist Ellen McGrath has good news: Not every depression is bad.
And, according to McGrath, many bad feelings women have are actually the result of “healthy depressions”--realistic and appropriate responses to the unhealthy culture in which they live.
“It’s an inescapable reality,” McGrath says, citing everything from women’s second-class status in society to a culture that demands physical perfection of women to physical and sexual abuse, “which is nearly always a precursor to depressions.”
“When women experience bad feelings that come from an unhealthy culture, they’re likely to blame themselves and feel they’re inadequate,” McGrath says. “The great majority of women are functioning well, but they’re feeling badly about some significant area of their life. It’s more than the every-day blues, but it does not mean that they are mentally ill.”
So what’s required, McGrath maintains, “is a new name for that whole range of experiences that fall in between the two,” a name “that doesn’t make them feel bad about themselves but can help them move into action to solve their problems.”
The idea that women have what McGrath calls “healthy depressions” and “healthy stress” is the focus of her book “When Feeling Bad Is Good” (Henry Holt; $22.95), “an innovative self-help program for women to convert ‘healthy’ depression into new sources of growth and power.”
McGrath, who has been teaching and conducting individual and group psychotherapy for 23 years, says the idea for her book grew out of the findings in a 1990 report by the American Psychological Assn.’s National Task Force on Women and Depression.
The report, which received national media attention, said that among all industrialized countries women were at least two times more depressed than men.
“That wasn’t just because they tend to talk about it more or anything else; they really were (depressed),” says McGrath, who chaired the task force and served as senior editor of the report.
Women, according to the report, were shown to have higher risk factors than men for depression, such as much higher rates of victimization--physically, sexually, economically and emotionally; they are more vulnerable if relationships go badly (a wife is three times more likely to be depressed than her husband); and women have learned ways of behaving that promote depression, such as pessimistic thinking and feeling helpless.
“What was real clear to me from that work,” says McGrath, “is that we knew a lot about how to diagnose and treat unhealthy depressions, but that’s not what the majority of people live with or experience.
“What most people, especially women, are working with are these healthy depressions. And we think that nine out of 10 women have at least one healthy depression, that it’s a cultural byproduct, or waste-product, depending on your perspective.”
In her book, McGrath identifies six of the most common “healthy depressions.”
* Victimization Depression: The bad feelings resulting from learned or real helplessness and a lack of coping skills to respond to society’s violence, negativity and discrimination against women.
* Relationship Depression: The bad feelings caused by the inevitable problems we all face in our meaningful relationships.
* Age Rage Depression: The depression women experience as the result of growing older in a society that has conditioned them to believe that female aging represents little else but loss.
* Depletion Depression: The bad feelings women experience from being chronically tired, overwhelmed and stressed by the role demands and role conflicts confronting contemporary women.
* Body Image Depression: The negative feelings almost every woman has when she attempts to meet impossible cultural standards of physical perfection.
* Mind-Body Depression: The physical problems that depression produces.
“Those are the range of bad feelings that people have that are normal, appropriate reactions to the unhealthy culture in which we live,” McGrath says.
“What becomes critical is that people (must) understand when they have a healthy depression--and what kind--and that they move into some action alternatives or action strategies to deal with it. Because if they don’t do these things, then they’re likely to grow into an unhealthy depression, and then you’ll need professional help to resolve it.”
There are, according to McGrath, literally dozens of action strategies for coping with healthy depressions.
“What we found is that just talking about problem is not enough,” she said. “You really need to move into action in terms of problem solving. The problem is that both depression and stress are energy drainers, so you need something that’s an energy booster, and these action strategies seem to create energy faster than anything we’ve found.”
The book lists several dozen strategies, which are, McGrath said, built on her years of clinical practice.
They range from writing down your feelings in a daily journal to drawing pictures of how you’re feeling: Draw an “angry” picture. But don’t just stop there. Tear it apart, crumple it up or flush it down the toilet.
“It sounds ridiculous, but it really works,” she says. “We’re finding the action of doing something becomes much more effective in freeing people up and creating energy and freeing them from the bad feelings.”
McGrath also suggests doing a relationship inventory: Make three columns, labeled positive, negative and toxic; list everyone you know and then write down the reasons why you feel that way about each one.
“By the the time you get done you’ve got a pretty good relationship profile and a feeling of more control over it because you’ve charted it, and you get a much better idea of the steps you need to take to improve your relationship,” she says.
If you’re coping with aging, McGrath suggests making a diagram of the “river of your life” in which “you’re really showing where you’ve been and where you’re going and focusing on the positive experiences available to us as we age.”
For those who feel stressed or depleted, she suggests making a quick list of the things that are causing the most stress and then, as with the “feeling” drawings, tear them up, burn them or flush them down the toilet.
Other stress reducers include smashing ice against a wall or sidewalk and even kicking a phone book.
“There’s something incredibly therapeutic about it,” McGrath says. “The point of the action exercises is they’re all energy boosters,” which will help prevent the negative feelings from turning into unhealthy depression.
