Pneumonia and Flu 12. The conventional wisdom that the rate of depression in women is two to four times the rate in men. But depression is experienced and expressed differently in men and women. Depressed men don't reach out for help in the same way that women do. In this culture we don't like men to be too expressive of their feelings or too openly vulnerable.
Depression is seen as unmanly and shameful.
It carries a double stigma for men, the stigma of a mental illness as well as the stigma of femininity. The signs of overt depression include fatigue, feeling sad or blue, having difficulty sleeping and experiencing changes in eating. With covert depression, however, you don't see the depression. What you see are the footprints of depression or the defenses a man is using to run from it. Some forms of self medication are tolerated by our culture, so it is hard to get across that what these men are doing is stabilizing depression.