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Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

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Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#21

Post by myth_drannon »

Spooky23 wrote: post #19
DoreenMichele wrote: post #3

Women tend to also have a lot more social baggage hung on them. It makes me wonder if the evacuation and trauma made it particularly difficult to figure out how to fit in socially in a new place. (I mean as just one element that may have contributed.)

Young women being evacuated are also like a dog whistle for rapists. Think about it. In a total mobilization, what caliber of conscript is getting assigned to guarding the kids? Who is going to be working at the orphanage or refugee center? I wouldn’t want my wife, sister or daughter in the custody the dregs of rear echelon conscripts in any Army. I’m not sure what the scope of the study was, but look at what happene…

From my understanding of WWII it was the opposite. Women that were not evacuated were raped by invading forces, women that were evacuated stayed in mostly all women dormitories/cities. The type of man who was evacuated as well was mostly physically sick or too old to fight.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#24

Post by jacquesm »

wvh wrote: post #23
chrismcb wrote: post #6

Interesting. But the study only looks at hospitalization. Is it possible that women are more likely to go to the hospital than men?

I reckon men with mental issues tend to end up in jail in many cases.

Drugs too, homeless as well.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#25

Post by Bartweiss »

chrismcb wrote: post #6

Interesting. But the study only looks at hospitalization. Is it possible that women are more likely to go to the hospital than men?

Yes, but doesn't the genetic control here also control for that?

They compared first children of refugees to their first-cousins born to non-refugees, and found a difference in frequency. So presumably a change would still be detected if sons of refugees were less likely than daughters to be hospitalized.

(I can think of some other ways gender could mess this up, I guess. For instance: schizophrenia is more common in men, heavily genetic, and probably not affected by refugee status - which could create a "base load" of male hospitalizations that pushes any change among men below significance.)

Also striking, though: "was not true for male offspring or the descendents of men." The headline misses it, but this result was only for daughters of mothers; even daughters of fathers (i.e. people with female hospitalization rates) weren't affected.

That's the part that screams 'epigenetics' to me.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#26

Post by Bartweiss »

Missing from the headline: this is only daughters of female refugees. Sons of refugees had unchanged mental illness rates, but so did daughters of male refugees.

That's pretty surprising, and while it doesn't rule out a gender-roles explanation (maybe male refugees didn't describe their experiences as often?), it does gesture pointedly at epigenetic causes.

Also notable: the study had a clever control (non-refugee first cousins of refugee children) which seems to account for both population genetics and gender distinctions in hospitalization.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#27

Post by alexanderstears »

jcrei wrote: post #22

Can we use this knowledge to do something about the children and especially the daughters of the refugees coming out of Syria now?

Are there that many women and children coming out of Syria? It seems like most of the migrants into the E.U are working aged men.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#28

Post by DoreenMichele »

tomp wrote: post #17
DoreenMichele wrote: post #3

Women tend to also have a lot more social baggage hung on them. It makes me wonder if the evacuation and trauma made it particularly difficult to figure out how to fit in socially in a new place. (I mean as just one element that may have contributed.)

Citations? AFAIK more men commit suicide so any inference drawn from such superficial statistics is going to be shaky at best...

I am thinking of phenomenon like The Pink Collar Ghetto, The Second Shift and our latest, oft misused, buzz word "emotional labor." These are all well documented phenomenon that taking care of others at their own expense is a burden routinely placed on women in a way that does not get done to men.

I am a woman. I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating high school class. I never got the serious career I wanted, nor the money that goes with such things.

So I have read a lot of books and articles on women's issues over the years trying to sort out what on earth went wrong with my life and how can I fix it? But HN is overwhelmingly male. Trying to discuss such things here from a female perspective is quite challenging. The vast majority of replies will be openly hostile and dismissive. It is rare that anyone is genuinely curious why an educated woman who is the antithesis of a feminazi would think such a thing.

Men here get incredibly defensive. Any whiff of the idea that "sexism" is a factor brings out the worst in comments. It is taken as an accusation that people are being intentionally and maliciously exclusionary. It makes it really hard to give a female point of view here at all, which tends to result in the gender based exclusion that people here seem to want to claim they aren't guilty of.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#29

Post by DoreenMichele »

emsy wrote: post #11
DoreenMichele wrote: post #3

Women tend to also have a lot more social baggage hung on them. It makes me wonder if the evacuation and trauma made it particularly difficult to figure out how to fit in socially in a new place. (I mean as just one element that may have contributed.)

>Women tend to have a lot more social baggage There are studies that show that women internalise emotional traumata much deeper than men, thus have a higher risk of PTSD (Can't remember if this is linked to the on-average better memory of women). As far as I know this is unrelated to the fact that women are more likely to seek help for mental issues (which would naturally skew the numbers towards women).

There are studies that show that women internalise emotional traumata much deeper than men, thus have a higher risk of PTSD (Can't remember if this is linked to the on-average better memory of women).

This in no way rebuts my thought. What if they are related? What if women internalize trauma more and suffer PTSD more in part because the entire social fabric of their life experience is fundamentally different from men?

This has been my experience as a woman. I do something a man would do, it gets a completely different reaction, and not in a good way. Trying to make my own life work gets me seemingly perceived as some kind of evil feminist. Men who try to figure out how to make money are not viewed as some kind of political activist or troublemaker, threatening the status quo.

I have gotten insane amounts of pushback for what I feel are completely innocuous behaviors. I have terrible eyesight, so I tend to sit up front in meetings or classes. This gets interpreted by other people as Type A personality extremely aggressive, ambitious behavior and prominent people will publicly comment on what an aberration it is. Their comments clearly come from a place of judging it to be disruptive, egomaniacal behavior. No one ever thinks "Well, maybe she can't see the presentation well enough from the back of the room." It is always framed in terms of me being an uppity woman who does not know my place in the world.

My "place" clearly being back row seats. Which reminds me of the historical expectation that blacks in the US had to sit at the back of the bus and stand up and give their seat to a white person if there weren't enough seats for everyone.

Re: Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

#30

Post by Nomentatus »

vectorEQ wrote: post #10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics if you know that this is heavily triggered by emotional / feels, then you can see why women might be more suceptible to these things. (as they are generally raised in a way to be more on the feels side of things, there is actually no natural difference, only imprinted later in life.)

Certainly there was a difference back then in how male and female children were allowed to deal with emotion. I was viciously beaten as a child in the early sixties for crying - as were my brothers - to teach me not to. My sister wasn't until older, if at all. These beatings could go on for very long periods of time, until breathing became convulsive, and continued after that point, too. When my younger brother died in his teens, my "training" held and I wasn't able to cry (but I've got that back in spades, since.) This was only somewhat extreme for the time. So back then, was there a "feels" (repression) difference for men and women? Oh, yeah, by no accident.

However, I believe the evidence shows this actually leaves males more vulnerable to trauma and PTSD, not less. I don't have links for that, just memory of the science, but what you deal with during the day is perhaps less likely to keep you up at night.

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