A new study has revealed that severe depression may be even more common in men than in women, if the symptoms are properly recognized in men.
This new research is in contrast to long-accepted norm that suggests, over their lifetimes, women are 70 percent more likely to have major depression than men, Stuff.co.nz reported.
Dr Andrew Leuchter, a psychiatrist who studies depression at UCLA, said that when it comes to depression in men, to some extent people have blinders on.
Leuchter asserted that they have not been asking about and taking into account a range of symptoms that may be gender-specific.
In the research, when a group of nearly 5700 American adults were assessed using the "gender inclusive depression scale," which included widely recognised depressive symptoms like sadness and hopelessness, 30.6 percent of men and 33.3 percent of women were found to have experienced a depressive episode at some point in their lives.
Additionally, when the subjects were evaluated with the "male symptoms scale," 26.3 percent of men and 21.9 percent of women were said to have experienced a major depressive occurrence in their lifetimes.
The difference, unlike the previous gap which was so narrow it may have been a statistical fluke, was large enough that it could not be due to chance, the researchers said.
The study wis published by the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
