Stress Among Women

The American Institute of Stress states that women are twice as likely to experience major depression compared to men and three times as likely to suffer from anxiety or stress related disorders; most likely due to hormone level differences and a variation of genetic make-up. That being said, women already have a greater chance, statistically and under the previous idea of the human genome, to endure the effects of stress related disorders. However, recent research on a process known as epigenetics states that an individual’s environment can genetically alter their genome. This research shows that if an individual is exposed to high-stress environments or lacks normal stress relieving innate mechanisms, this will genetically alter their genome …show more content…
In 2005, residents of the United States all along the Gulf Coast experienced adverse effects from the hurricane Katrina catastrophe; specifically, women found in economically challenged areas were part of a study conducted to document the changes in mental and physical health among three hundred ninety-two low-income parents exposed to Hurricane Katrina, exploring how hurricane-related stressors and loss were related to post-Katrina well being. The study showed that symptoms of mental illnesses doubled and nearly half the respondents exhibited PTSD (Rhodes, Chan, Paxson, Rouse, Waters, & Fussell, 2010). Hurricane Katrina cost people their homes, jobs, lives of loved ones, and a sense of financial stability, all of which transformed into stressors, exacerbating any lack of stress coping mechanisms an individual possessed before the catastrophe and imprinting new stressors on their epigenome. The hurricane also reduced the educational and health facilities available in the city, decreasing the resources available to cope with the exacerbated stressors. Flooding, contamination, and no substantial infrastructure to shelter women and their families from the environment will result in medical difficulties and the inability to regain stability. Due to the scarcity of resources women in non-industrialized areas possess, the stressors accumulated because of the catastrophe they experienced will linger in their lives and establish themselves as mental disorders. A year later, the survivors reported caregivers of children as becoming disabled with depression, anxiety and other psychiatric problems, supporting the prolonged mental deficits caused by the climate change induced catastrophe (Rhodes, Chan, Paxson, Rouse, Waters, & Fussell,