DSM diagnoses incorporated into future questionnaires?

Hi All,

Another bit I just thought about was gender differences in the diagnosis of mental disorders. Lippa talks about this in his book Gender, Nature and Nurture, and notes significant sex ratio differences in diagnoses of mood, substance, and sexual identity disorders among others (Lippa, 2005, p. 37). To be frank I am wary of contributing to a culture of diagnosis that suggests personality/mood/anxiety imbalances are disorders subject to labeling, and I believe we have to be careful about how the DSM-IV labels and interprets “disorders:” we have to keep in mind the DSM listed homosexuality as a disorder until 1973 (Herek, 2012, para. 17).

That said, the DSM allows us to tabulate ratios of empirically-collected data on the subject of the above disorders and that may be very helpful in a wider pursuit of gender comparisons.

I’m not sure we addressed the issue of mental health in our questionnaire; might this be something for future questionnaires?

i've taken evolution psychology before and i am pretty sure that gender has a great influence on mental disorders. for example, depression and eating disorders are mostly diagnosed in women. However, this could be due to men do not report themselves having mental disorders or admit that they have mental issues for some reasons. It's probably because of how the society views on men. Nevertheless, i think your suggestion is pretty good.

based on mental illness, i've thought about some possible future research topics 1. life expectancy 2. self-esteem (or happiness) 3. environmental adaptation (both physical and mental)

other topics could be -marital status -numbers of children

hopefully these are something that can be researched in the future.

hey ricky, youve made some great suggestions for future research. just wanted to let you know that i summarized an article from Lippa et al. (2000) in the gender studies section about masculinity and mortality. you might want to consider revising the second point under future research, as there has been some investigation into this relationship (gender and life expectancy).

How strong is the gender effect for the mental health conditions? Does the textbook give d values? All of the items that we included had d values of 1 or greater. This also reminds me that at least one of our questions seemed to tap into body image.

i actually do not know the d values, but i have the male:female ratio data from another textbook.for instance, the ratio of Autism of male:female is 4:1 (Brune, 2004) and the ratio of depression is female:male 2:1 (Brune, 2004)

Great info on this page, nice work! I'll look for more m/f mental health ratios as well.

Comer also mentions that "women are at least twice as likely as men to experience episodes of severe unipolar depression" (Comer, 2010, p. 242); females also account for 95% of diagnoses of anorexia nervosa (ibid, p. 342).

Also I was inspired by a chapter in the Lippa book Gender, Nature and Nurture and added a bit to the bottom of our page about the importance of careful question development in order to include wider demographics.

Comer mentions obsessive-compulsive disorder has a roughly equal distibution between males and females (Comer, 2010, p. 150). Women outnumber men 2 to 1 with regard to specific phobias (Comer, 2010, p. 135) and generalized anxiety disorder (Ibid, p. 123).

Also I'll reference the DSM IV-TR in case anyone wants to look further into the subject of mental disorders.

What is really cool with the phobias is that they appear to be socialized out of boys and into girls (by boys!) that both sexes are equally phobic until school age.

Not sure if it matters, but our course text suggests that as incidences of alcoholism are greater in males by the same factor, that male depressive symptoms may be masked.

I find it interesting that some mood disorders are more prevalent in females (i.e. borderline personality disorder - 3 times more prevalent in women than men!) while others are more prevalent in males (i.e. antisocial mood disorder). Why is it that certain mood disorders affect one gender more than the other?? BPD also results in more stereotypically "female" behaviours i.e. high emotionality, "neediness", eating disorders etc.. while antisocial results in increased criminal activity, being a "tough guy" i.e. having no real emotional responses, and increased aggression -- more sterotypically male behaviours. Could be a great topic for future research?

Kevin, I think you touch base in a very important and valid point: the medicalization of the genders, and I agree with you in the importance of exercising caution while interpreting the DSM.

As it was the case with homosexuality being categorized as a disorder (and now a days being more recognized as another sexual orientation), there could be many other orientations which are overlooked or categorized as disorders, because as a society, we are not ready to accept them for economic, political and religious reasons, for example.