North Carolina Central University Gender and Mental Health Discussion

As you’ve been reading since chapter 3, our sense of ourselves as a gendered person is a psychological process that is strongly influenced by socialization. In this discussion forum, we will examine different aspects of living a gendered life. We will include sexuality in this discussion.

For your post:

1) Select a specific topic that interests you about gender (and sexuality if you wish). Some ideas for topics:

• growing up female in a developing country
• the interaction of gender and race/ethnicity
• being gender queer or transgender (in the U.S. or elsewhere)
• socialization about sexuality based on gender
• LGBT and gender
• gender and mental health
• gender and sexual health
• control over reproduction (in the U.S. or elsewhere)

2) Locate a reputable source on your topic. We define a reputable source as one that meets all three of the following criteria:

• Authored by individual professional author(s) or professional organization in a field relevant to developmental psychology
• The source is sufficiently formal, designed for a professional audience (not a blog or other type of “pop psych” piece)
• The author’s own sources are clearly identified in a reference list within the publication.

3) Share information from your source in your post. Include a reference for your source in APA style.

For your responses:

Discuss how the information in your classmate’s post has informed your view of that topic. Is it consistent with what you’ve witnessed or experienced in your own life? If not, explain why you think your own experience differs. Gender and Mental Health.

reply to these two articles1)

Psychiatry is a field of psychology that studies and treats mental illnesses, emotional disturbances, and abnormal behavior within a person. The Lancet informs us that differences in mental disorders based on sex and gender are the most “intriguing” and “stable” discoveries in the field of psychiatry. There are a number of differences in terms of how common a mental disorder is within a certain gender, symptoms, warning signs, and that factors influence the disorder(s). For example, the mental illness “depression” is more common within those who are born female than those who are born male (Riecher-Rössler, 2016). Christine Kuehner had reviewed this case, and she found risk factors were sex hormones, HPA axis (the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands on top of the brain stem and above the kidneys) response to stress, their low self-esteem, high tendency to body shame themselves and other women, and a lack of gender equality and discrimination (Kuehner, 2016). There are many risk factors that contribute to women who struggle with depression.