The answer to this question is not long or complicated.
To Write Love on Her Arms says this
Depression does not discriminate across age, race, gender, or class.
In other words, everyone and anyone can get depression. Black Dog Institute has information on depression in children, teenagers, adults, over 65’s, medically ill and pregnancy & postnatal. If you fit into one of those then there is a chance that you could get depression.
There are many things that can contribute to the development of depression (which I’ll look at in the next post) but something that people should be aware of is that depression is something that can run in families, so some people will have an increased genetic risk of getting it. However, this doesn’t mean that if a family member has it you will get it, it just means that you could have an increased chance of getting it.
So everyone has a chance of getting it. However women are twice as likely as men to get depression, possibly due the the various hormones changes that we will go through in our lives.
But men you are not out of the woods. Depression in men often manifests itself as anger or hostility and men are prone to covering their condition with alcohol or drug abuse.
Men, if you get depression you are four times as likely to commit suicide than women. This is probably due to the shame felt as a result of depression. This is why I think education is so important – no one should feel ashamed about this or about getting help.
Helpful links –
Lifeline Australia (24 hr hotline – 13 11 14)
More from me on depression here.
a girl who speaks 
I’ve maintained for a while now that the only prerequisite for depression is a working heart and a working mind. It discriminates far less than we do, ironically enough. hanks for the D-posts.
your welcome – thanks for your comments!
hopefully over time more and more people will come to the same conclusion and people (especially blokes) can stop feeling too ashamed to to get help
Just had to comment on:
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Pretty funny seeing the candidates conference as possibly related to depression ;)
I know ‘too many’ ppl who suffer with/have suffered from depression, from a relatively ‘minor’ case through to some major need for hard-core anti-depresents.
No matter what the situation, i think the hardest thing about depression is opening up and talking about it. There is still such a social stigma attached to it that makes people afraid to talk about it. On this groups such as Black Dog Institute and Beyond Blue are doing some great work.
I look forward to your future posts on this one Kate :)