Interest in the area of women's mental health has been slowly gathering pace. Women not surprisingly differ from men in terms of the epidemiology and pathophysiology of certain mental health problems, the treatments they respond to, the services they require and the issues they face. Women are almost twice as likely as men to suffer from depressive and anxiety disorders. They are less likely than men to misuse alcohol and other substances but, when they do, the impact on the family is profound. Failure to address gender-specific differences in mental health not only burdens women themselves but also families, society in general and the mental health of future generations. In this book, a multinational group of authors crystallises work in this area to create an invaluable resource for all those involved in women's mental health.
The contributors consider mood, anxiety and related disorders from a broad biopsychosocial perspective, charting gender differences and gender-specific issues through life from before puberty to old age. The volume's range is wide, covering not only anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder, but also childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, gender-specific vulnerabilities to personality disorders, substance misuse, premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy, the post-partum period and the menopause. The authors appropriately round off the volume's excellent collection by challenging clinicians' aapriori priori assumptions that women's mood disorders in old age represent ‘the inevitable decline of dementia’, making instead a plea to redress that imbalance by challenging the view that a woman ‘has had her innings’.
Despite its attractive cover, the book is not quite coffee-table material. Most chapters are beautifully written while remaining rich in research information, but in some chapters, heavy biological, pharmacological and statistical terms might frustrate the efforts of the well-informed non-medical reader.
A small quibble (and only that) is that despite the comprehensive summaries throughout, I missed a satisfying concluding chapter which might have drawn together the excellent material of the preceding chapters. The volume ends abruptly following the chapter on old age, and, as a reader, I felt the need for a eulogy.
Nevertheless, I unequivocally recommend this book. It makes an ambitious contribution to our understanding of gender disparity within the field of women's mental well-being, effectively collating current disparate information into a coherent integrative overview. The result is a collection of meaty essays which should comprehensively satisfy the appetite for an enlightened and broadened perspective.
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