An estimated 57 million Americans – about one in four adults – suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. This fall’s Gender Studies Lecture Series addresses the importance of mental health awareness in women.

Karen Prager

Dr. Karen Prager

“For the upcoming lecture series, we decided to focus on depression in women in part because of its prevalence,” said Dr. Karen Prager, professor of psychology and head of the Gender Studies program. “Studies show that women are diagnosed with depression twice as often as men and are at least two times as likely to attempt suicide.”

Julie Hersh begins the series at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 23, in the McDermott Suite (MC 4.404) of the McDermott Library. Hersh is an advocate for mental health awareness and author of Struck by Living, a personal narration of searching for identity through a career, marriage, motherhood and the edges of suicide.

Dr. Anna R. Brandon will continue the conversation with a lecture entitled “The Psychological Transition to Motherhood and Perinatal Depression,” at  5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 7,  also in the McDermott Suite. Brandon is a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Women’s Mental Health Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. 

Specializing in mood and anxiety disorders occurring across women’s reproductive events, Brandon is funded by both the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for her development and investigation of Partner-Assisted Therapy (PAT) for perinatal depression and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a pilot qualitative project identifying the ethical challenges to conducting controlled research with pregnant women. 

Brandon recently received the 2010 March of Dimes Young Scholar Award in Perinatal Bioethics for the paper, “Ethical Barriers to Perinatal Mental Health Research and Evidence Based Treatment: An Empirical Study.”

The Gender Studies Lecture Series is sponsored by the School of Interdisciplinary Studies Gender Studies program and the Carolyn Lipshy Galerstein Women’s Center.