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Women's Issues
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Suicide Highest Killer of Pregnant Women
July 7, 2002
Contrary to the old belief that a woman would do anything to protect her child and therefore the will to live would be strongest during pregnancy and shortly thereafter, a team of British researchers have found that exactly the opposite may be true. They have found that suicide is the main cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers. The report notes many suicides are "violent" and take place before the child's first birthday. According to a paper delivered to the Royal College of Psychiatrists the problem is increasing and health workers need to stay alert for signs of extreme depression. Many new mothers or pregnant women die by hanging, jumping off bridges, drowning, cutting their throats and throwing themselves in front of moving vehicles, rather than opt for the popular suicide method of overdosing.
Read more in American Psychological Association site Psychport
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For Some Women Exercise Ain't All Its Cracked Up To Be
September 30, 2002
Exercise not only improves your health, it makes you feel good. It's a message constantly reinforced through research, advertisements and the news media. However for a subset of women -- those with eating disorders -- exercise may have no feel-good effects. In fact, it may induce just the opposite feeling. And women in general may get less psychological benefit from exercising than men.
Those are among the conclusions presented last month by researchers Jennifer Gerlach and Dorothy Espelage at the American Psychological Association annual convention in Chicago.
The study involved 324 undergraduates at Illinois, 235 women and 86 men, with an average age of 19.9 years, who were asked to complete questionnaires assessing exercise behavior, strategies for coping with stress, self-esteem, life satisfaction, positive and negative affect (similar to mood), depression, anxiety and eating behavior. The men and women were comparable in their level of exercise.
The researchers' primary goal was to determine how exercise was used as a strategy for coping with stress. But what they found in the process were curious associations between exercise and psychological health. For the men as a group, they found statistically significant associations between exercise and almost every measure of psychological health. For the women, however, most of those associations were either weak or statistically insignificant.
The researchers also found that exercise was related to both positive and negative affect, "and that didn't make sense," Gerlach said. They hypothesized that eating disorders played a part in the contrary numbers, and so split the women into subgroups. Eleven percent were categorized as having an eating disorder, based on their responses in the questionnaires. The other 89 percent were put in a non-eating-disorders group.
For the majority group, exercise was related to positive affect, Gerlach said. "But for the women who had an eating disorder, exercise was related to negative affect, and there was a slight trend for more depression and more anxiety." For those women, "exercise isn't related to positive psychological health," she said.
One possible explanation may be that men and women exercise for different reasons, with societal pressures causing women to worry more about body image, over just feeling good or having fun, Gerlach said. Over-exercise may be a component of eating disorders that needs further exploration, she said.
Read more on the University of Illinois website
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Lesbian Families Have Happy Children
July 7, 2002
Scientists from the Dutch Speaking Free University of Brussels in Belgium quizzed 41 preadolescent children brought up by lesbian couples. The children were asked about their feelings with regard to the anonymous sperm donor, and their lesbian mothers. Their comments were compared with a control group of children conceived naturally to heterosexual families.
Parents and teachers were also asked about how well-adjusted the children were. The researchers found that 46% of the children would have liked to know more about the donor, although not necessarily information that would identify them. Boys, more often than girls, wanted to know the donor's identity.
Most of the children were open to others about the fact that they had two mothers. Most did not suffer stigmatization about their family set-up from their peers. The children's perceptions of the way that they interacted with their family did not differ significantly with those who were being brought up by heterosexual families. With the lesbian families, children interacted with both their mothers in similar ways.
The researchers presented their work to the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Vienna. They said: "Most children had informed their friends about their family structure and did not report being teased or bullied. No differences were found between youngsters raised in lesbian families and those raised in heterosexual families with regard to the quality of their interaction with parents and their psychological wellbeing."
Researcher Dr Katrien Vanfraussen said: "We can conclude, with some caution, that growing up in a lesbian family does not jeopardise children's welfare. They seem to cope rather well." However, she said that the children's continued happiness would be dependent on society accepting the concept of non-traditional families.
Tyranny of the Biological Clock
At the same conference Dr Clare Murray of the City University in London reported her findings that more than two-thirds of single women who choose to have a baby using donated sperm do so because they fear they are running out of time, new research indicates. In the first study to look at single mothers who use sperm banks, researchers found that fertility problems were not the motivation in most cases.
Dr Murray said many of the mothers in the study would have preferred to have a child within a relationship. She was speaking at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Vienna.
However, nearly a third of the women, whose average age was 38, said they actively wanted to go it alone. The issue of whether single heterosexual women should have access to sperm banks has been controversial, and some clinics require women to be in a stable relationship before they will offer artificial insemination.
But Murray's early results found no difference in the quality of parenting between single and married donor-inseminated mothers.
The researchers compared 22 single women whose babies were born from donor sperm with 36 married women who had undergone the same treatment. The babies were all less than a year old. The researchers plan to follow the children for many more years. There were no differences between the two groups of children in eating and sleeping difficulties.
All the single mothers had lots of friends and relatives helping them. A third of them had daily contact with a member of their families, compared with only 14 percent of the married mothers. The single mothers were also much more open with people about the origin of their babies than the married women were.
These findings should not be all that surprising. In anthropological and primate terms children are mostly raised by females. Certainly in the first six years of life the male role in child rearing is, traditionally, slight. Indeed in most ape communities the male is more often seen as a danger to the newborn and is kept away. In hunter-gatherer societies, again, most of the interaction children experience is with women. The danger, at least with male children, comes after the age of six when they naturally gravitate to a male to find a role model. BM
Read more in Ananova News Service
Read more in BBC News
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Fatigue May Cause Postnatal Depression
March 25, 2002
In their study, the Pennsylvania-based team distinguished between "postpartum blues," which affects 50 to 80 percent of new mothers, and "postpartum depression," which affects only 15 to 20 percent of women. The "very dangerous mental illness," postpartum psychosis, affects less than a half percent of new mothers, according to the researchers from Penn State University.
Postpartum problems classified as "depression," rather than "blues" or "psychosis," can last from two weeks to one year and are linked to reported fatigue after the first week and fortnight following birth, their research suggests.
Women were visited within 24 hours of giving birth and subsequently on day 7, 14 and 28. "Women with high levels of fatigue on days 7 and 14 were significantly more likely to report symptoms of depression on day 28 than women with low levels of fatigue," said Ingrid Bozoky, one of the researchers who visited mothers at Pennsylvania's Center Community Hospital.
Dr Elizabeth Corwin, assistant professor at the university's school of nursing, told delegates at the Scientific Session of the Eastern Nursing Research Society that fatigue after childbirth is "normal." But she said the study suggested that depression is more likely in those mothers who do not experience a "fall off" in fatigue in the first 28 days after delivery.
Dr Corwin suggested that a questionnaire about fatigue used on the 14th day after birth could be administered as a matter of course on the baby's first visit to a paediatrician or other healthcare provider. "There certainly is some connection between fatigue and postpartum depression. Mothers should remember that they need to take care of themselves after giving birth."
Read more in Health-News
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New Report on Women and Depression
March 25, 2002
These findings are among those summarized in a new report, "Summit on Women and Depression: Proceedings and Recommendations," just published by the American Psychological Association, and reflecting the research reviewed by 35 internationally renowned experts from a variety of disciplines who contributed papers to the Summit.
Major depression can impair a person's social and physical functioning even more severely than serious medical conditions such as hypertension, diabetes or arthritis, and can result in disability and significant loss of income, according to the research cited in the report. Furthermore, a World Health Organization Report examining "The Global Burden of Disease" found that "depression presents the greatest disease burden for women when compared with other diseases."
Among the major causes of depression in women the report singled life stress and trauma. Case-control and community-based studies have shown that more than 80 percent of major depression cases were preceded by a serious adverse life event. Traumatic events, such as childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual assault, male partner violence and physical illness also can lead to depression. Initial research has suggested that early trauma has a greater impact on risk for depression than later occurring trauma. Research has also indicated that women may be more likely than men to experience depression in response to a stressful event.
The report also outlined current research that has demonstrated that relationships are more paramount to women's self-concept than for men's. It also stated that women are more likely to experience stress in response to adverse events occurring in the lives of others and place their needs secondary to those of others. These interpersonal orientations illustrate major psychological differences between men and women that may help account for differences in vulnerability to depression.
Once again it is gratifying to have our long-held beliefs authenticated. BM
Read a summary of the report on the APA website
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Depression Leads to Overeating for Women, But Not Men
March 25, 2002
That is according to University of Minnesota psychologist Robert Jeffery. His year-long study of 1,800 obese men and women looked at gender differences in the eating behavior of overweight adults. "Moods don't seem to be driving men's eating, but depression is a key driver for women," said Jeffrey, speaking at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Barcelona.
At the start, everyone rated how difficult they found it to resist food in varied situations -- at parties, when watching TV, etc. -- or while experiencing certain emotions. Participants also took a depression test and were asked about their medical histories. Women were nearly twice as likely as men to have a history of depression. "Body weight is not a big issue for men," Jeffery says, "but a lot of these women might be depressed because they're overweight, and the social consequences of this for women are much greater."
Women's depression around weight apparently prompts even more weight gain. For women, depression was strongly tied to trouble controlling eating behavior. Depression correlated with the women's inability to resist foods even more than their body weight did. For men, the heavier they were, the less confident they felt about controlling their weight; depression had no bearing on that confidence.
But could men just be denying that food is a crutch for them? Jeffery thinks not, because the relatively lighter men voiced more confidence about resisting food, and the heavier men said they had more trouble.
A year later, after receiving counselling in a weight-loss program, women who weren't depressed lost more than twice as many pounds as the depressed women who said they had trouble resisting food. For men, neither mental health nor confidence about controlling eating predicted weight loss.
Men usually have to be much more overweight than women before they'll enter weight-loss programs, Jeffery says. Women dominate group programs, "and programs with a lot of women ought to be addressing depression." Men, he says, "tend to be a lot more naive than women" about what puts on the pounds. "Eating is kind of a knee-jerk thing for them." An informational approach might work best for men, he says.
Read more inAmerican Psychological Association and USA Today
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Population Estimates Fall as Women Assert Control
March 11, 2002
For decades, experts assumed that the world's biggest developing nations, the home of hundreds of millions in big families, would push the global population to a precarious 10 billion people by the end of this century.
Now, according to an article in The New York Times, evidence is coming in that women in rural villages and the teeming megacities of Brazil, Egypt, India and Mexico are unexpectedly proving those predictions wrong. In India alone, by 2100 there may be 600 million fewer people than predicted.
The decline in birthrates in nations where poverty and illiteracy are still widespread defies almost all conventional wisdom. Planners once argued -- and some still do -- that falling birthrates can only follow improved living standards and more educational opportunities, not outrun them. It now seems that women are not waiting for that day. What's more, a few demographers are venturing to say that the trend may have little to do with government policies on family planning or foreign aid.
Since the United Nations conference on population and development in Cairo in 1994, women in many countries have said that if they had control over their reproductive lives, lower fertility rates would be a given. Women's health organizations now say that is happening.
"From Delhi to Rio, women's health advocates have stood fast against top-down population policies, and have stood for women's rights -- and abilities -- to make decisions about their bodies," said Cynthia Steele, vice president for programs at the International Women's Health Coalition in New York. "Whether they live in villages or high-rises, women have always known what's best for them and their families. Now we're seeing the results of their own choices to have fewer children."
Joseph Chamie, the director of the United Nations population division, told The Times: "A woman in a village making a decision to have one or two or at most three children is a small decision in itself. But when these get compounded by millions and millions and millions of women in India and Brazil and Egypt, it has global consequences."
In India, Gita Sen, professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, said in a telephone interview that there were important cultural factors at work. "Fertility in India is declining and it is declining faster than =any people had expected," she said. One reason, she said, is "that with increasing awareness on the part of women, they are being able to control their own fertility much better." With declining infant mortality, mothers become more confident that their babies will survive, Ms. Sen added, and so they can have fewer children. She and other experts say that urbanization also eases some family controls on women, and makes contraceptive pills or devices easier to find.
There are 74 countries in what the United Nations calls the intermediate-level fertility group, with births between 2.1 and 5 per woman. This group includes very populous countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Some demographers question whether any one trend will fit them all, and ask whether it may not be as mistaken to herald a general population decline to below replacement levels as it was to pronounce that the larger developing nations would never reach this stage. John C Caldwell of the Australian National University urges caution. He writes of a "loss of fervor" in the developing world for further fertility decline. Countries are not homogenous, he argued, and there are some large ones in Africa and Asia where there will continue to be a preference for more children.
Read more in The New York Times
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Women More Harmed by Bad Relationships
February 10, 2002
Affairs of the heart take a much more serious toll on women than men, according to research from the landmark Framingham Heart Study.
Men reap health benefits from all marriages, happy or unhappy, while womens' hearts suffer under the stress of bad relationships. A number of other studies suggest women are physically more vulnerable to marital conflict; for example, a woman's blood pressure rises much more than a man's during a fight with a spouse. What's more, women with heart disease are also almost three times more likely to have a second heart attack if they are in a stressful relationship.
Until recently, most research on heart disease was conducted exclusively on men. The Framingham Heart Study is one of the few, large, long-term studies of cardiovascular disease that has included both men and women from the start.
Researchers have studied more than 5,000 men and women and their offspring from Framingham, a Boston suburb, since 1948. Their efforts have revealed a number of risk factors and symptoms of heart disease unique to women, while teaching the world much of what is now known about women and cardiovascular disease.
Read more on Intelihealth
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Alcoholism Harms Women's Brains as Well as Men's
February 10, 2002
This according to a new study published in the journal Neuropsychology. According to the researchers, the problems of alcoholism in women last longer. Impaired working memory and visuospatial abilities remain months after alcoholic women stop drinking.
With this research, a team from Stanford University has further clarified sex differences in alcoholism, which affects about 4.6 million US women (about one third of the estimated US alcohol-abusing or alcohol-dependent population).
Scientists have known how alcoholism damages the nervous system (including the brain) for decades, but primarily in men for two reasons. First, early researchers studied patients at Veterans Administration hospitals, far more likely to be men; second, more men than women abuse alcohol.
Once the medical community found that research on men does not necessarily generalize across the sexes, they began to study the effects of alcoholism on women, and found some significant differences. For one, although women drink less than men and are less likely to use or abuse alcohol, death rates among alcoholic women are 50 to 100 percent higher than among their male counterparts. This higher mortality may be related to other sex differences, including the facts that women exhibit more psychiatric problems than men and metabolize alcohol differently from men, this last perhaps in part due to women's higher body fat.
According to the researchers "the current research was intended to assess any possible sex differences in alcoholism-related neuropsychological performance, because knowledge of how (and if) alcohol differentially affects women can inform how we prevent, diagnose and treat the disease."
For the women alcoholics, the neuropsychological deficits remained significant even after average abstinence of three months, reflecting the chronic nature of the disease even after the acute effects of intoxication have worn off. "The warning for loved ones and healthcare providers," says lead researcher Edith V Sullivan, PhD, "is that the seriousness of alcoholism-related dysfunction is commonly under-appreciated, and the time necessary for recovery is underestimated." Complicating the situation, she adds, "there is some evidence that women are able to cover up their problem more successfully than men, which may suggest that they can better compensate for their cognitive and motor deficits."
Sullivan suggests that the nervous system's recovery from alcoholism — while possible to some degree — be viewed not in terms of days but rather months or even years, as with cerebral stroke. Active rehabilitation, consequently, may need to continue for some time to enable complete recovery.
In sum, the study confirmed that, as it does in men, alcoholism damages women's brain structure and function in measurable and specific ways that resist recovery for longer than expected, and can be greater in old age because alcoholism may exacerbate normal age-related brain shrinkage.
Read more on Intelihealth
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Suppressing Emotions Increases Anger in Women
January 23, 2002
New research has revealed that women who suppress their emotions can be left with even more angry feelings. The study by the University of Aberdeen looked at what happened when women deliberately concealed their anger.
The investigation was conducted using three studies of male and female participants.
"The results showed that the women in the study who had suppressed their anger reported feeling more angry, outraged, upset and disgusted than their male counterparts," said Dr Judith Hosie, co-author of the report.
During the study the male and female participants were shown two emotional film clips. One group was invited to express anger while others were told to suppress any feelings. A third group was asked to replace any angry feelings with a happy memory.
After they had seen the film clip with these directive in mind, the subjects were shown a second emotional film and allowed to respond spontaneously. After seeing the second clip, the women who had suppressed their emotions described their feelings as stronger, more angry and more upset than the men. Many of these women said they felt more like swearing than males.
One of the key findings was the evidence of a "rebound" effect for emotion. "The subjective intensity of anger was increased in women by suppressing the expression of that anger," explained Dr Hosie.
Psychologist Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire said concealing angry emotions -- in both males and females -- can have a bad effect on a person's overall health.
"A lot of emotion is suppressed and the most common one is anger," she said. "Suppressing anger is bad for you and can lead to raised blood pressure and other associated problems."
Read more in BBC News
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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