"Males don't wanna bring anything up to their doctor": men's discourses of depression

Abstract

Men experiencing depression may present with externalizing behaviors including avoidance, getting angry, or finding distractions rather than seeking help. General practitioners report that depression is harder to diagnose in men than in women. Research has not typically focused on men’s accounts of depression; thus, the current study uses an exploratory design to better understand men’s subjectivities of depression. A thematic framework informed the analysis of interviews with 10 men who had experienced high levels of depressive symptoms at least once within the prior 5 years, with two overarching discourses of depression discussed. The first relates to links between depression and health, including comorbid illnesses. The second relates to social contexts in which depression is experienced. These findings extend upon previous research suggesting medical practitioners have difficulty with competing biomedical and social discourses of depression, highlighting the importance of continuing to improve understandings of men’s depression discourses.