Letters to the Editor
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Not just girls...
This is the problem I've always had with the "talking cure" of psychiatry/psychology. Make no mistake; a little of it, in the middle of a crisis, can be a good thing. But endless weeks and years of focusing on one's problems produces, in my experience, a person who is overly focused on his/her problems and not necessarily in a constructive way, who is more neurotic and not less.
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This 'bonding' can be competitive
There are certain subcultures (I grew up in one) in which misery is a goal. Among other things, it is a very effective manipulative tool for making people you would not normally have power over feel guilty - and unless you are a sociopath or have borderline personality disorder, this tool works best if you yourself are convinced of how miserable you are. So even when you hang out with peers, proof of intense misery can become competitive. No wonder everyone gets more depressed.
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Duh
It is true that endless talking about troubles leads to wheel-spinning--how much can you say, really?--and finally to a reinforcement of the negative, but that does not explain the gender gap in this mysterious finding that girls who talk freely to their friends spiral into depression and boys who talk don't. Well, gosh, do you think that could be a reflection of society's gendered valuations?
I know that the word "patriarchy" dates me as so completely last century, but without it I don't know how to comment on this situation. If you are scratching your head at the radical idea that maybe the girls start out feeling worse about themselves than the boys, and so end up feeling worse, or that the problems depressing the boys have solutions and the problems depressing the girls actually don't, take a gander sometime at the advice columns. Guy writes in and says, I'm having trouble with my girl friend, what do I do about her? Girl writes in and says, I'm having trouble with my guy, what do I do about myself? I like to define patriarchy as an emotional economy in which, in a typical male-female relationship, the man worries about himself and the woman worries about the man. I AM a man, so I can tell you that this plays out very satisfactorily for men and most of us find it easy to think that it is somehow a natural state of affairs.
But if you go the route of the evolutionary psychologists and pay no attention to cultural factors, it won't be hard to keep producing these studies that prove that women, bless their souls, are just innately messed up.
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If it does that to the girls, just think what it does to your husbands.
What talking really does is make sure we all understand it's about you, and that your take really is the right take, and that our take is meaningless apart from being indicative of our failures to understand anything about you or being a woman or how we objectify you or displease you and blah blah blah blah blah.
In a society obsessed with enumerating women's failures, this seems like a fitting preparation for adulthood.
What society is that? Near as I can tell, our society is obsessed with enumerating women's successes regardless of how small or petty they are. We're in the self-esteem society and the you go girl society and in the it's okay to bash males, especially white males society. So really Lloyd, unless you have citations, please get off the pot with your crap about this being a society that is obsessed with enumerating women's failures.
Or to paraphrase this article, tell it to someone who cares, which as it turns out according to the study, is not even your girl friends. Why? Because it's self-defeating depressing whiny victimizing nonsense.
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Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness
I sort of understand what you're saying GL, but I think you (and the original post) are making the issue unecessarily complicated. As I see it, it is a simple matter of taking responsibilty for your own life and your own happiness. If someone or something is making me unhappy I remove them from my life and seek happiness elsewhere. I can see how in the past this might have been easier for men to do than for women, but I don't see why that should be the case now.
Generally speaking, we all have the freedom to do what we want, with whom we want. If people want to spend their lives obsessing over things that make them miserable (and I've known both men and women who do this) that is their choice to make. But in this day and age, they really only have themselves to blame for doing it.
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Gender Communications
Without sounding scientific, could this be an extension of gender communication styles ? My wife always gets mad at me when she tells me about her problems and I try to solve them for her. You know, she just wants to share them. Maybe when boys share their problems, they actually try to identify ways to solve them, where girls are sharing but not looking for answers.
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Misery Breeds Company
I have noticed that bonding for women means sharing your troubles. Thus creating the opportunity for being supportive. When I am chatting with women I tend to ignore the little baited hooks they put out. They are just little invitations to expose your minor anxieties to the world and prove yourself human--vulnerable.
Obviously this feminine approach to bonding does have the big advantage of building a supportive network of friends for times of real crisis. On the other hand it's nice to see someone note the rather glaring downside.
For men who see no point in churning over minor problems they can't fix it can be quite vexing. There are some other rules of female style conversation that deserve to be questioned. Like a tendency for constant non-confrontational niceness, which often makes for anti-intellectual and boring conversations.
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Talking about problems versus solutions
The connections that others have already pointed out to the mental health professions are interesting. Just talking about your problems over and over, with no end in sight, is depressing! There is a lot of money to be made from certain forms of "therapy" that encourage expression without promoting actual change. What does appear to be effective are treatments that are relatively time-limited, that focus on finding and implementing solutions to life's problems, that identify and challenge reasons to NOT get better, and that foster a proactive approach to relapse prevention. In other words, problem-solving with a heavy helping of psychological insight.
Of course, community and social change is a large part of this as well. It will become much easier for girls to problem-solve and change their lifestyles when they are able to perceive viable alternatives to being sexbots, airheads, overresponsible mother figures, or any of the other unsavory choices our culture seems to force upon young women. In the meantime, it's unlikely that talk alone is going to solve anyone's problems.
The results of this study surprise me not in the slightest.