Females and males in an intake psychiatric setting

It is generally acknowledged that some psychiatric disorders are more commonly found among members of one sex rather than the other (e.g., Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1976; Gove and Tudor 1973; Kass et al. 1983; Robins et al. 1984; Rosenfield 1980; Weissman and Klerman 1977). Females, moreover, are consistently overrepresented in treatment populations of different sorts, and various reasons involving responses to illness and inclination to seek treatment have been offered to account for this (Finkler 1984; Kessler et al. 1981; Nathanson 1975; Verbrugge and Wingard 1987). In contrast to accepted gender differences in prevalence, incidence and inclination to use services, a prevailing view about psychopathology is that the actual content or manifestations of a disorder should be "culture free" or universal. In the theory of psychopathology (e.g., implicit in DSM-III), general descriptors of the person (i.e., demographic and cultural) play a comparatively minor role in the stipulation of the manifestations of psychiatric illness. Among socially and culturally oriented psychiatrists, on the other hand, such descriptors are considered important clues to origins of psychopathology. However, in such analyces, sociocultural is usually equated with altogether different symbolic/language traditions (e.g., Finkler 1985; Lieban 1978), although reports exist of sex differences in symptom expression in Western societies (Brown and Harris 1976; Hinkle et al. 1960; Nathanson 1979). Feminist critics assert that even within the sociocultural tradition linked to Anglo-American society, a bias exists with respect to how psychopathology is shaped, defined and handled (Kaplan 1983; Showalter 1985). The topic of gender differences in psychiatric morbidity is thus of considerable general interest and one that can be approached from a number of different perspectives. In this study we compare psychopathology in males and females who were referred to an intake setting. The DSM-III formulations and level and type of symptoms were the focus of analysis. The results are interpreted in light of findings in psychiatric epidemiology and social psychiatry.