Psychiatric comorbidity is another factor that contributes to our understanding of gender differences in alcohol use across the lifespan. Most notably, major depression is one of the most common comorbid conditions with AUDs, and is also a disorder that shows one of the strongest gender effects along with AUDs. In childhood, girls are no more likely than boys to evidence depression, but by about age 13, girls’ rates of depression begin to increase sharply, whereas boys’ rates of depression remain low, and may even decrease. By late adolescence, girls are twice as likely as boys to be depressed, and this gender ratio remains more or less the same throughout adulthood (Nolen-Hoeksema & Girgus, 1994). Among adults, it has been consistently shown that men are more likely to have an AUD without depression and women are more likely to have depression without an AUD (e.g. Kessler et al., 1994). However, the gender difference is less pronounced in those who have both disorders concurrently (Grant, Hasin, & Dawson, 1996). Depression and alcohol use is complex, but a clear conclusion is that depressive
