Link – Talking to Men About Depression
This is something that we often miss, and prevents us from seeing depression in many people to begin with:
“Part of the difficulty was that my friend’s symptoms were more about impatience, irritability, and anger than behaviors we typically associate with depression, such as crying, moping, and an inability to get started with any task because everything seems so daunting. And this is often a reason why depression in men can be more difficult to identify than depression in women. Depressed women tend to “act in” (sleeping too much, crying, overeating, drinking too much, failing to fully function, etc.), while depressed men tend to “act out” with unpleasant behaviors. So a depressed woman might look and act depressed, while a depressed man might just seem like he’s being a jerk.
Yes, plenty of men do get depressed with tears and an inability to function, and plenty of women express anger and rage when they’re depressed, but as a general rule, depressed women are more obvious about what they’re feeling, while men just seem unhappy and angry. “
I know for me that sign number one that I’m dealing with a bit of depression is the level of irritability I have in every day interactions. There are days where I simply hate everyone. Some of that passes when I spend some time in self-care, sometimes it doesn’t and I need to step back and look at my entire mental health picture.
I have always wondered how many men, and women, with depression get overlooked because their actions don’t “look” like depression.
