About 15 percent of all women suffer from a depressive disorder at some point in their lives ; fewer than a third of victims get any form of help.
Without treatment the frequency and severity of symptoms tend to increase over the years.
The trouble arose when George began looking at the physiology of sorrow.
He asked his experimental volunteers to recall their saddest memories while he tracked the flow of blood inside their brains.
The tests included both men and women , although George be not looking for discrepancies between them.
Neither sex had much difficulty conjuring up suitably sad thoughts , and in both sexes the PET scans displayed a strong increase of circulation to parts of the limbic system , a primitive region deep within the brain.
But there was a striking difference : the total area of the brain involved in the reaction was eight times larger in his women subjects than among the men.
I was quite afraid of the way the data might be interpreted in the general press , he says.
The last thing he wanted was to be associated with sensational headlines about women's brains being more emotional than men's.

Stryker Brigade off to a tough start

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