Depression: what women carry has nothing biological about it

According to Le Monde, the Haut Conseil à l'égalité entre les femmes et les hommes (France's High Council for Equality between Women and Men) published a report on depressive disorders on Monday 2 November. Its conclusion: women's higher risk of depression is the product of a social construction. Throughout their lives, they are more exposed to inequality and violence. The dispatch gives us no further figures and no detail on the recommendations; we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not the content of the report.

For a long time we were told that women were "more fragile". Hormones, sensitivity, temperament: the vocabulary changes, the reflex remains. The report puts this narrative back in its place, that of a lazy explanation. When an entire group falls ill more often, it is rarely useful to look for the flaw in the bodies before looking at the timetables.

Let us look at them, then. Capitalism rests on work that produces people rather than commodities: raising children, cooking, caring, cleaning, looking after elderly parents. This work is largely unpaid or badly paid, overwhelmingly done by women, and filed outside the "economy". It appears neither in balance sheets nor in productivity statistics, yet without it nobody gets up in the morning to go to work.

The result: the double shift. Alexandra Kollontai described it more than a century ago: capitalism made the woman a wage earner without lightening her burdens as housekeeper and mother. Washing machines did not abolish the mental load, that list of shopping, medical appointments and parents' evenings spinning on a loop in a single head. Add lower pay, forced part-time work and, according to the report, greater exposure to violence: you get a terrain where exhaustion settles in without a sound.

And austerity makes it worse. When the hospital closes a department, when the nursery lacks places, when home help is no longer funded, care work does not disappear. It falls back on households, which means, in practice, on women. We call this an economy; it is a transfer of burden, with a health bill at the end.

Depression, on this reading, is not a manufacturing defect. It is a collective symptom of a system that relies on the unpaid endurance of some to balance the books of others. Treating every patient is essential, and there must be psychologists, reimbursed consultations, time. But prescribing rest to a woman who has no one to take over from her is politeness, not treatment.

What remains to be seen is what the public authorities will do with this report. Reports, as we know, often end up in a drawer, between two rounds of spending cuts. The real question comes down to few words: who pays for care, and who provides it? As long as the answer is "women, for almost nothing", the depression figures will say nothing different.