Woman and Depression: A Behavioral-Contextual Analysis

Abstract

Depression is, nowadays, a significant public health problem. Depressed patients often spend more days away from work, become more frequently, clinically ill, are at higher risk of suicide than people in general, among other problems. Among those diagnosed as “depressed”, there are twice as many women with this diagnosis as there are men. Behavior Analysis explains depression from the contingencies present in the environmental context in which the depressed person is inserted. This article is a review of literature about depression related to women and aims to discuss this relation from a behavioral analytic perspective. The contexts of pregnancy, violence, health problems and socioeconomic factors and family are discussed in this article.