IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v44y1997i3p403-412.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Problems in accurate medical diagnosis of depression in female patients

Author

Listed:
  • Floyd, Bonnie J.

Abstract

Research in women's health has revealed the difficulties female patients experience in their attempts to receive accurate medical diagnoses. Depression may be misdiagnosed in 30-50% of female patients. This difficulty is considerably enhanced when women have physical diseases characterized by symptoms that resemble a major depressive disorder. In addition, medical treatments may induce symptoms that are misdiagnosed as affective distress. Multiple causes contribute to an enhanced likelihood of misdiagnoses in women, including physicians' androcentrically orientated medical training and the two-to-one female-to-male ratio of depression treatment. The adverse consequences of incorrect diagnoses range from unnecessary expenditures of a woman's resources to potentially life-threatening medical conditions. Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients. A woman's age, sexual orientation, menstrual, occupational, and/or parental status represent potential areas of discrimination in diagnostic determinations. Suggestions are offered for improving the accuracy of health care providers' diagnoses in women.

Suggested Citation

  • Floyd, Bonnie J., 1997. "Problems in accurate medical diagnosis of depression in female patients," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 403-412, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:44:y:1997:i:3:p:403-412
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(96)00159-1
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Halpin, Michael, 2011. "Diagnosis, psychiatry and neurology: The case of Huntington Disease," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 73(6), pages 858-865, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    diagnoses women depression;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:44:y:1997:i:3:p:403-412. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.