Mental Health: Depression, Anxiety, and Anger in the USA

Using data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES) for the United States for the period 2001 to 2003, this chapter addresses the question of inter-gender differences in depression, anxiety, and anger rates: how much of the observed difference in rates between men and women may be explained by differences between them in their exposure, and how much may be explained by differences between them in their response, to depression-inducing factors? The chapter makes two contributions: first, it uses an “interaction model” which allows men and women to respond differently to each of several condition-inducing factors, which is key in determining whether there is a significant difference between male and female responses. The overall conclusion is that, with a handful of exceptions, there are significant inter-gender differences in responses to all the variable categories. The second contribution of this chapter is to aggregate the different responses for the different variable categories into an overall response. This was achieved by applying the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methodology to quantifying the contribution of differences in exposure, and differences in response, to inter-gender differences in depression, anxiety, and anger rates. The overall conclusion from this exercise is that the most important reason for women and men experiencing different rates of depression, anxiety, and anger is not levels of exposure, but rather that women respond differently from men to factors which induce these conditions.