Any comments or insights on this topic? (You can even venture outside of the gender angle to examine depression in general, if you'd like...)
I didn't know this was news...
From what I remember, the theory goes that talking reinforces the actual situation, working your mind up into a frenzy rather than dealing or coping with it. One of the reasons why therapists work and friends do not is because friends
agree with you to make you feel better... but it reinforces the issue in your mind, making the stress a part of your life. It strips away the ability to deal with it at a practical level.
Females have two major traits differences that make this affect them more; they are programmed to share in order to bond and they are more emotionally reactive.
The first causes them to share more than is healthy - one of the comments in the article says something along the lines of "we wouldn't do it if it hurt us", followed by an explanation of how females share to bond. That's exactly it - it's group suffering in order to bond, but that pushes the boundries compared to men, who do bond under the same conditions but don't have the drive to share. Females are also more emotionally reactive (ie: more likely to express/release emotions, to swing up and down and to feel emotions more intensely), although they still span the same range as men. This means that when they talk about their problems, they will tend to work themselves up and have a disportionate emotional reaction (either compared to men, or compared to women who don't talk it out).
From memory and not really validated...
The short answer;
+Women reinforce their problems.
+Women have a stronger emotional reaction
+Women bond through sharing of problems
+Women need to bond
+Women tend to agree with each other to support each other (see bonding!)
= Excessive negative reinforcement + lack of objectivity and problem dealing.
It's all relative though - while women are more likely to do this, especially at a young age, men can get themselves into that situation. My brother is currently in this cycle right now.
He cut off his friends because they were telling him he was a idiot and stuck with those that put up with his stupidity. That has reinforced it to the point where he transformed himself from a tough guy into a quivering mess of jello.
And it reminds me of my GF - she was baking yesterday with plans to bring it in to work. After finishing it all up, waiting for it to bake, she went to remove the banana loaves from the oven - except they stuck and she couldn't get them out. She wasn't happy. However, it was only when I tried to console her that things got worse. She went from being irritated to crying, from stupid pans to the world hates me.
It doesn't help that both of them are emotionally reactive to start with... but it makes them serve as perfect examples!
The mistake is to generalise the theory to all females - even though teenager females are probably the worst of any group I could imagine, which is why it probably showed up strongly there. Teenager males doing this aren't exactly considered very manly...