Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

One of my oldest friends, Asia Wong, now a clinical social worker in New Orleans, told me: “When I, as a clinician, talk to people about depression, we talk about how three things contribute: your biology; your inner landscape or psychology, which we can work on in therapy; and then your life circumstances. If your life circumstances really suck, you are going to be sad most of the time. You’re going to feel anxious and overwhelmed. If you say, ‘I’m taking care of my aging parents, and I’m working full-time, and I have these little kids, and my husband still has some traditional gender-role stuff,’ you’re going to be sad. Not because you ‘have depression,’ but because your life is debilitatingly difficult. And what I think has changed is that we used to think this was true for poor people. And now it feels true for all of us.”