Why Are LDS Women More Likely To Get Depressed?

A study published in the 1983  Dialogue: A Journal For Mormon Thought, sought to determine the prevalence of depression among Mormon women. The survey compared rates of depression among non-LDS women and LDS women, only to find the difference to be statistically insignificant. However, the study identified a number of factors that related to depression: education, caring from spouse, health, and income.

Interestingly, the 1983 study did not find that employment outside the home, age, stressful life events, number of children, or marriage to a non-LDS spouse affected a woman’s likelihood of having depression.

Intriguing as the Dialogue study results may be, it only looked at a small sample of Utah women — and a lot can change in over 30 years.

The more recent The Next Mormons Survey (NMS) is attempting to answer some of the same questions for our modern time.

Jana Reiss On Depression Among Mormon Women

In her most recent article “Mormon Women and Depression, revisited,” Religion News Service writer, Jana Reiss, shares some of the statistics from the NMS.

At the beginning of the article, Reiss reports that 27% of LDS women and 14.5% of LDS men say they have taken or are currently taking medication for depression. These numbers are not shocking considering The World Health Organization has confirmed a gender gap when diagnosing depression.

The divide most likely results from a variety of factors, including hormonal differences between and underreporting of depression by men.

Reiss also throws in a few LDS-specific reasons depression might affect more LDS women than LDS men, such as stress from high-expectations for women, stay at-home motherhood instead of a career, and the resulting lack of a social network.

But Reiss does not “pass judgment” on any of these reasons because she is —understandably — unsure, presumably because there is little evidence of a Mormon specific gender-influence on depression rates.

Reiss goes on to list some factors examined in the survey and their correlation to depression:

• Age: matters a little
• Employment: matters a little, but not very much
• Democrats more likely to take medication
• Very active in the Church less likely to take medication (22.5%) vs. inactive (35%)
• Women with no children and women with more than 4 children are a little more likely to take medication than those with 1-3 kids
• Those who have been divorced are nearly twice as likely to take medication (41%) than those who are married (23%)

The Issues With This Survey

First of all, let’s start with the survey itself. Unless you donated $100 to the KickStarter that funded the distribution of the survey, you won’t be able to see a compilation of the data. The only means of obtaining information on the survey is through the articles Reiss has published and a supposed journal article by Centre College political scientist, Benjamin Knoll.

This makes it extremely difficult to gauge the statistical significance of the findings when there’s no reported sample size, and Reiss’s apparent scale to communicate the results is a nondescript point system.

“The rates for women who were unemployed and not looking for work were five points higher than those who worked full-time and just one point higher than those who worked part-time,” writes Reiss, as if we have any concept of this point system.

There’s also no evidence the survey has been peer-reviewed, or that the survey questions themselves weren’t loaded. Reiss addresses this concern herself at the end of the article, informing us that the responses they used to build their findings came from this question:

“I have taken or am currently taking medication for depression or another mental health issue.”

…What? 

That 21% of Mormons who reportedly suffer from depression might not be suffering from depression. They could have anything from long-term anxiety, to bipolar disorder, to a short bout of postpartum depression (notice the question doesn’t stipulate a timeline).

The question also doesn’t tell us about how many people have depression, but how many people have ever been medicated for depression (or any other mental illness): two entirely different things.

Reiss ends her article by saying the results are neither black nor white, but nuanced and complicated. Unfortunately, nuanced and complicated are not synonyms for unscientific and biased.