Question:
As actress Melanie Griffins once said "women feels 9 times more pain than men"
Is it true that woman brain chemistry is much less tolerable than man, and depression is a heritage trait which happen in a family?
Answer:
Could be something to that...Redheaded people have a higher tolerance to pain and anesthesia ...
More iron... more iron to be bound up…Men have more iron...women less...Therefore …Women or... estrogen high men ... heal faster ... (which in some parts of the world in the case of men would be obviously very good ) and depression as in ... iron BEING *genetically* predisposed therefore CAN ... be 'appearance wise' ... BE ... genetic ... BUT ... in fact ... is only due to the higher ... iron ... levels ...
One would simply have to study iron loading diseases 'traits' such as hemochromatosis / Irish / Celts / Vikings and thalassemia or others and see if THEY have higher than normal propensity TO .. mental disease …and just off hand ... the increased incidence to depression / drinking IN ... Irish / Scots?
It's very difficult to separate out the cultural factors here. Women may be more likely to seek treatment for depression, hence show up in the statistics more than men do. There's a theory that there are more
alcoholic men than women because men are more likely to self-medicate with alcohol for depression than women are.
Depression is more than one disease, and is a symptom of a number of other medical conditions. Obviously, only women get post-partum depression. It's long been known that there is a hereditary component to at least some forms of depression in both sexes.
A mutant gene causing bipolar disorder (manic depressive disease) has been identified in several large family trees. Susceptibility to major depression is a symptom of several genetic conditions including trisomy-X. Some recent work with a very large number of unrelated people in New Zealand has identified a gene with an allele that causes a susceptibility to major depression if the person is also exposed to prolonged stress in late childhood and adolescence when the brain is still developing.
So nobody knows whether women are more likely to get depressed than men, under identical circumstances, because the circumstances are never identical, and reporting isn't unbiased. But it's well established that at least some forms of depression have a hereditary component.
