ReviewCulture, medicine and psychiatry2016
An Illness of Power: Gender and the Social Causes of Depression.
Review in Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms in Healthcare Workers Dealing with the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Effect of combination therapy of methylfolate with antidepressants in patients with depressive disorder.BMC pharmacology & toxicology · 2025Trial
- How physical activity and gender moderate the association between parental marital conflict and adolescent depression.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Albuminuria and Mental Illness Risk: Results From National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005-2018 and Mendelian Randomization Analyses.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Impact of Demographic Factors on the Treatment Response of Antidepressant Therapy: A Descriptive Cohort Study from Pakistan.La Tunisie medicale · 2025 · on this mapArticle
- Multisystemic resilience and its impact on youth mental health: reflections on co-designing a multi-disciplinary, participatory study.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- Comparative Efficacy of Animal Depression Models and Antidepressant Treatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Pharmaceutics · 2024Review
- The association of vitamin D deficiency, age and depression in US adults: a cross-sectional analysis.BMC psychiatry · 2023Article
- Beyond the biomedical, towards the agentic: A paradigm shift for population health science.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2023Article
- A Semantic Cognition Contribution to Mood and Anxiety Disorder Pathophysiology.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Psychological impact on care professionals due to the SARS-Cov-2 virus in Spain.International nursing review · 2022Observational
- The path of depression among frontline nurses during COVID-19 pandemic: A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.International journal of mental health nursing · 2022Article
- Analysis of the Psychosocial Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Nursing Staff of the Intensive Care Units (ICU) in Spain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Identification of putative genetic variants in major depressive disorder patients in Pakistan.Molecular biology reports · 2022Article
- COVID-19, sex, and gender in China: a scoping review.Globalization and health · 2022Article
- Investigating Viewership of Season 3 of "13 Reasons Why" and the Mental Wellness of Adolescents: Partially Randomized Preference Trial.JMIR mental health · 2021Article
- Which of us were more affected by the pandemic? The psychiatric impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare professionals in the province where the first quarantine units were established in Turkey.International journal of clinical practice · 2021Article
- Entanglements of loneliness and mental ill health among young adult women.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2020Article
- Mental health status of medical staff in emergency departments during the Coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic in China.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2020Article
- Prevalence and Influencing Factors of Anxiety and Depression Symptoms in the First-Line Medical Staff Fighting Against COVID-19 in Gansu.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is considerable discourse surrounding the disproportionate diagnosis of women with depression as compared to men, often times cited at a rate around 2:1. While this disparity clearly draws attention to gender, a focus on gender tends to fall away in the study and treatment of depression in neuroscience and psychiatry, which largely understand its workings in mechanistic terms of brain chemistry and neurological processes. I first consider how this brain-centered biological model for depression came about. I then argue that the authoritative scientific models for disorder have serious consequences for those diagnosed. Finally, I argue that mechanistic biological models of depression have the effect of silencing women and marginalizing or preventing the examination of social-structural causes of depression, like gender oppression, and therein contribute to the ideological reproduction of oppressive social relations. I argue that depression is best understood in terms of systems of power, including gender, and where a given individual is situated within such social relations. The result is a model of depression that accounts for the influence of biological, psychological, and social factors.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.