Shining Vale: Do Women Really Suffer From Depression More
Warning: Contains spoilers for Shining Vale, episode 2.
The first images in Shining Vale claim that women are twice as likely to suffer from depression, but whether this is true or false is a little bit more complicated. Shining Vale is a horror-comedy series and draws heavily on Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s book. Through this, it presents a reexamination of that narrative through a female lens that has this claim about depression at its center.
The opening title cards of Shining Vale first claim “Women are roughly twice as likely as men to suffer from depression.” The cards then go on to explain the symptoms of depression and to note that women are also roughly twice as likely to be possessed by a demon and that the symptoms are the same. Shining Vale then tells the narrative of Pat Phelps (Courteney Cox) and her family moving to a new house in Connecticut after she has had an affair, and shows how her depression has been responded to with heavy doses of medicine.
The wording of Shining Vale’s introduction is technically misleading, even without considering the explanation’s binary view of gender. It is very hard to know how many people truly suffer from depression and what that demographic makeup might be. However, women are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with depression than men. This is in part because women are statistically more likely to seek help for their depression while, owing to the societal prevalence of toxic masculine ideas about emotion, men are less likely to see someone about their depression, which ultimately leads to a higher rate of suicide among men. While some part of the discrepancy in depression diagnosis comes down to who is more likely to seek help in our society, there are other factors at play that do mean that women are more likely to suffer from depression. There are certain conditions that are more common amongst those assigned female at birth that are a subset of depression diagnosis, such as post-partum depression and menopause, that ultimately skew the statistics.
While Shining Vale’s title card is potentially reductive regarding depression statistics, the show itself provides more nuance. In the scenes that see Pat and Terry Phelps (Greg Kinnear) visiting a couple’s therapist, both of the characters are demonstrating symptoms of depression. However, the therapist diagnoses Pat with depression and prescribes an extremely high dose of anti-depressants, while for Terry he just identifies that he has pent-up anger and needs to work through his feelings. This all suggests that the show is relatively self-aware about the discrepancies at work here.
The possession statistic that follows up the depression information at the start of Shining Vale largely goes hand in hand. In a range of cultures, possession has long been used as an explanation for a huge raft of different mental conditions, depression included, that might induce a change in behavior. For the same reason that women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, it has been more common for them to be diagnosed with possession. The same ideas lie behind the notion of “hysterics” and other uncharitable descriptions that have been applied to women throughout the ages. So while the phrasing of Shining Vale’s title cards might be reductive and should not be taken at face value, it is clear that the show is primarily using the idea as a vehicle for an examination of gender and mental health on a larger scale and is self-aware of its process.
Shining Vale releases new episodes Sunday on Starz.